Twenty-year retrospection on green manufacturing: A bibliometric perspective

Abstract

In the modern age of Industry 4.0 and manufacturing servitisation, energy saving and environment consciousness are regarded as vital themes in manufacturing processes to reduce carbon tax and achieve sustainable development. For the past 20 years, the concept of green manufacturing has grown from infancy to a fully formed framework agreed upon by world-leading enterprises. With the unprecedented development of the information technology today, the industrial data collected could assist in the in-depth study on green manufacturing, which ranges from the operations of machining tools all the way to supply chain management. The wide scope of research promises a tremendous amount of annual publications in this field. To better facilitate follow-up research work, the present study provides a systematic overview of green manufacturing-related areas, including research progress and the developed features. The article set retrieved from the Web of Science contains 5989 documents related to green manufacturing. It is revealed that Journal of Cleaner Production is the most productive journal, archiving documents within the scope of green manufacturing. P. R. China tops the list of the number of documents with 1357 documents (22.66%), while Zhejiang University is the most productive institution. As the cooperation network indicates, P. R. China and the United States maintain the strongest collaborative links with other countries/regions. Finally, possible future directions are recommended based on the findings in the study. For instance, additive manufacturing technology and industrial IoT both have a great potential in green manufacturing; the weak link between the disciplines of manufacturing engineering and environmental science is expected to be strengthened, and a stronger international cooperation is believed to be beneficial to the field for the otherwise isolated countries/regions.