Way forward for alternative energy research: A bibliometric analysis during 1994–2013

The alternative energy plays a crucial role in the sustainable energy development. The alternative energy related literature had attracted a growing attention with the research outputs expanding substantially. Based on the Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCI-E) and the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), a bibliometric analysis of the research output was carried out to depict existing research activities on alternative energy and future directions. The article was the main type of publications with the English as the dominate language to explain their results. With the publications increasing rapidly since 2008, the researches mostly focused on the fields of Energy & Fuels and Environmental Sciences. Energy Policy was the journal that published the largest number of research articles on the alternative energy. The bioenergy and solar energy were popular items in the commonly used 20 journals. Among the countries, the USA was leading on alternative energy related research, publishing the largest number of articles (TP=2368) and being the most influent (h-index=90). The USA played a key role in the academic collaborations with China, UK, Canada, Germany, Italy, South Korea and Spain. The National Renewable Energy Lab (the USA) contributed most in the alternative energy field and more specially, the School of Electrical & Computer Engineering (TP=36) was the most productive subordinate in the National Technology University of Athens. It was interesting to note that more attention was paid to solar or wind energy during the first 5 or 10 years, then turned to bioenergy subsequently except for Spain, Canada and Australia. In addition, bioenergy received the most attention in the 7 types of alternative energy. The forest/wood biomass, energy crops and switchgrass were the main bioenergy resources and fermentation was the commonly used conversion technology. The production of biogas, biodiesel and bioethanol was most popular in the bioenergy related studies. Wind energy and solar energy related researches were mainly on the energy utilization approaches such as the wind generation, wind farm, photovoltaic and solar thermal. The conversion devices such as the wind turbine and solar cell were paid most attention in order to improve the production efficiency. The most cited article, published in Desalination in 2009 with 1562 citations until 2013, was about wind power utilization in the reverse osmosis desalination plant.