A bibliometric study for DEA applied to energy efficiency: Trends and future challenges

Bibliometrics refers to the statistical analysis of publications, which mainly include journal papers, books, and conference proceedings. It is an effective method for organizing and analyzing available information on a given research topic and has been commonly used in various disciplines. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of all publications about the researches on energy efficiency based on data envelopment analysis (DEA) retrieved from the Web of Science database. A total of 1206 documents in this field, published until 2018, are retrieved from the Web of Science. This study pays special attention to several key issues such as the general citation structure, the most cited publications, the productive journals, institutions and countries/ territories in the area. The cooperation model and cooperative network between countries and research institutes are presented. The key nodes documents in this field are analyzed through the study of literature co-citation. The evolution of research hot spots is explored by analyzing the keywords based on text mining techniques. Three different knowledge diffusion paths such as forward local main path, global main path and key-route main path are presented to identify the knowledge diffusion path of this field. The main advantage of this study is it provides a general picture of this domain. The achievements of this study will undoubtedly be valuable for future research in energy efficiency and will have great reference value to other disciplines.