Empowering impact assessments knowledge and international research collaboration - A bibliometric analysis of Environmental Impact Assessment Review journal

Innovation, knowledge exchange and collaboration are fundamental in environmental studies. Impact assessments represent a key tool in identifying and predicting the environmental consequences of a project. The journal Environmental Impact Assessment Review started promoting research discussing different issues or methods in the field of impact assessments and environmental management since 1980. By analyzing 1664 articles published within the journal between 1980 and 2018 by 2935 authors, affiliated to institutions from 75 countries, this study aims to provide a better understanding of the environmental assessment research trends. Bibliometric indicators such as keywords or country of affiliation were analyzed through a network methodological approach, including co-occurrence analysis, centrality metrics and multiple correspondence analysis. The international collaboration and productivity maps bring a novel overview to this type of analysis and reveal new perspectives for thrived cooperation on environmental assessments research. The results illustrate the most common research topics through a conceptual structure map and a keywords co-occurrence graph with a temporal overlay, which allows observing their evolution over the years. Furthermore, this work tries to explain the political, economic, social and technological factors that influence the tendencies in environmental assessments research and scientific cooperation, providing future insights for environmental scientific priorities.