Evolution and structure of sustainability science
Evolution and structure of sustainability science
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DOI：
10.1073/pnas.1102712108
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发表时间：
2011-12-06
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
Kaur, Jasleen
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Bettencourt, Luis M. A.;Kaur, Jasleen
可持续发展的概念自1980年代出现以来取得了非凡的成功。它们现在是政府和公司议程的一个组成部分，它们的目标已成为世界各地研究实验室和大学使命的核心。然而，目前尚不清楚该领域作为一门科学学科已经取得了多大的进展，特别是考虑到它的雄心勃勃的议程，即整合理论、应用科学和政策，使其与全球发展相关，并产生跨领域的新的跨学科综合。为了解决这些问题，我们收集了该领域学术出版物的语料库，并分析了其时间演变、地理分布、学科组成和合作结构。我们表明，自20世纪80年代末以来，可持续性科学一直在爆炸式增长，当时该领域的基础出版物增加了对新作者的吸引力，并加强了他们之间的互动。该领域具有不同寻常的地理足迹，结合了贡献，并通过合作将处于不同发展水平的城市和国家联系起来。它对传统学科的分解揭示了它对人类、社会和生态系统管理的强调，主要是从工程和政策的角度来看。最后，我们表明，这些观点的整合在最近几年才创造了一个新的领域，这是由科学合作的一个巨大组成部分的出现来判断的。这些发展表明，作为一种不寻常的、包容的、无处不在的科学实践，可持续性科学领域正在不断发展，这预示着其持续的影响和长寿。
The concepts of sustainable development have experienced extraordinary success since their advent in the 1980s. They are now an integral part of the agenda of governments and corporations, and their goals have become central to the mission of research laboratories and universities worldwide. However, it remains unclear how far the field has progressed as a scientific discipline, especially given its ambitious agenda of integrating theory, applied science, and policy, making it relevant for development globally and generating a new interdisciplinary synthesis across fields. To address these questions, we assembled a corpus of scholarly publications in the field and analyzed its temporal evolution, geographic distribution, disciplinary composition, and collaboration structure. We show that sustainability science has been growing explosively since the late 1980s when foundational publications in the field increased its pull on new authors and intensified their interactions. The field has an unusual geographic footprint combining contributions and connecting through collaboration cities and nations at very different levels of development. Its decomposition into traditional disciplines reveals its emphasis on the management of human, social, and ecological systems seen primarily from an engineering and policy perspective. Finally, we show that the integration of these perspectives has created a new field only in recent years as judged by the emergence of a giant component of scientific collaboration. These developments demonstrate the existence of a growing scientific field of sustainability science as an unusual, inclusive and ubiquitous scientific practice and bode well for its continued impact and longevity.