It is almost a truism to state that interdisciplinary research and collaboration are essential to finding solutions to pressing societal and global challenges. To address the complex threats to harmony between the environment and socio-economic development, academic endeavours need to prioritise an interdisciplinary approach that involves natural, social, and human sciences. The extent of interdisciplinary work in sustainable development studies (SDS) is, however, unknown, largely due to the complexity of the task of mapping the field. This limits both the use of its research outputs and the initiation of new interdisciplinary collaborations that can help address research gaps. This paper aims to assess the interdisciplinarity of the field of SDS by a multicomponent bibliometric case study of research published or referenced in the journal Sustainability between 2011 and 2020. The study uses CiteSpace to analyse bibliometric information from 28,464 articles. It tracks indicators of interdisciplinarity over the 10-year study period in 1) the top 3 authorship networks (227 co-authors) of the 15 most prolific authors, 2) the 8 most highly cited publications, 3) the 8 theme clusters of the 50 most frequently occurring keywords, and 4) the 25 references with the strongest citation bursts. It also explores emerging trends in interdisciplinarity through diachronic analysis of 5) the 25 authorship networks of the 25 most prolific authors and 6) the topics of the 25 most highly cited publications for each of the 10 years of the study period. Finally, it explores 7) the publications output of Arizona State University (ASU), comparing figures for departments that have been intentionally structured as interdisciplinary against figures for traditional departments. The study seeks to inform strategies to enhance the interdisciplinary exploration of the relationship between the environment and socio-economic development.
Wang et al. (Thu,) studied this question.