Knowledge dynamics and sources of eco-innovation: Mapping the Green Chemistry community
Résumé
Over the last fewdecades, the interest for developing a more sustainable chemistry has increased worldwide and has triggered the proliferation of new knowledge. The present article aims at investigating the dynamics of scientific knowledge underlying this emergent field, the main countries and organizations involved, and the factors that have shaped the evolution of the field. In order to circumscribe such a still fluid area of research, we first show how an epistemic community around the concept of Green Chemistry (GC) has emerged and materialized. Wethen build an original dataset of scientific publications generated by this community and apply two algorithms for the analysis of citation networks. That allows us to identify and analyze the scientific knowledge that laid the foundations of the GC community and the main scientific trajectory that emerged along its whole evolution. The results highlight that the GC community, strongly supported by the US EPA, has grown exponentially since 2000 and has spread among a wide range of countries, including emerging countries. The results also suggest that policy and industry interests, as well as regulation, have played a significant role in shaping the emergence and evolution of GC.
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