The comparative landscape of Chinese and foreign articles on the carbon footprint using bibliometric analysis

In recent years, the carbon footprint is regarded as the most important assessment tool of greenhouse gas emissions; it has attracted great attention of Chinese and foreign governments, enterprises, and relevant scholars. However, the comparative bibliometric analysis of Chinese and foreign articles on the carbon footprint research is still limited; thus, it has become the motivation of the present study. To quantitatively analyse the bibliometric differences between Chinese and foreign literature of the carbon footprint research, 673 Chinese articles and 3755 foreign articles between 2007 and 2020 were extracted from the Web of Science Core Collection database. On this basis, the publications, publishers, journals, authors, and institutions of Chinese and foreign articles were compared, and especially, the keyword and citation analysis results were obtained via the biblioshiny tool of bibliometrix R package. Results show that the output and influence of foreign articles are more prominent than Chinese articles in general. The foreign carbon footprint research is more systematic and mature than Chinese research, and both sides have some research topics of common concern and maintain their own research characteristics. Specific results may provide some reference for relevant researchers, policy makers, and the public.