Trends and features of embodied flows associated with international trade based on bibliometric analysis

Trade plays an important role in redistributing resources and also brings significant environmental impacts to involved countries. This relatively complex research domain of international trade and environmental burden shifts is informed through study of embodied environmental flows of products. Research trends to identify features of international trade embodied flows between 1997 and 2016 are determined through a bibliometric study. Research contribution of countries, authors, institutions and journals are described. Co-citation and network analyses are completed. Results show that there has been significant research interest increase on this topic. Given the interdisciplinary and global nature of this topic, increases in countries, author, and institutional collaborations has occurred. USA, China, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Norway were the top 5 countries with high academic influence, and country as USA and institution as Chinese Academy of Sciences has the largest number of collaborations, respectively. Embodied flows such as carbon emission and water are popular ones associated with international trade in the given period, and the most popular methodological tool is Input/Output Analysis. In addition, hotspots which extracted from keywords are analyzed, additional avenues of research are also discussed in this study.