Contributions of the bibliometric approach and the Cortext Manager tool to the review of scientific literature. An application to the analysis of the consideration of the environment in regional science literature (1999-2019)

Abstract

This article presents an original bibliometric approach and certain functionalities of a bibliometric analysis tool, the Cortext Manager platform, via an application focused on the analysis of the integration of environmental issues in articles published on regional science between 1999 and 2019. The first step of the analysis consists in describing, on the basis of classical bibliometric indicators, the entire corpus of 1145 articles extracted from the Web of Science. Then, an analysis of keywords cooccurrences is carried out to distinguish 4 main thematic groups. Lastly, new bibliometric analyses, coupled with a qualitative analysis of articles cited the most frequently, makes it possible to characterize each thematic group from the angle of outstanding documents, the main themes dealt with, and seminal works. Additional bibliometric analyses carried out on each of these groups and crossed with the qualitative analyses on the main articles of the groups provide a more precise view of the content of the articles, and identifying the major scientific issues broached and the groups of seminal works cited.