50 years of Resources Policy: A bibliometric analysis

Resources Policy is a leading international journal in the field of economics and policy issues related to mineral and fossil fuel extraction, production, and use. The journal was created in 1974 and in 2024 celebrates its 50th anniversary. Motivated by this special event, this paper presents a bibliometric overview of the leading trends of the journal during its first half-century of existence. This paper analyses Resources Policy's publication and citation structure using the Web of Science Core Collection and examines various aspects, including the most cited documents, productive authors, institutions, countries, and popular keywords, and topics. The paper also develops a graphical visualization of the bibliographic data using the Visualization of Similarities (VOS) viewer software. This approach utilises various bibliometric techniques, including bibliographic coupling, co-citation, and co-occurrence of keywords. The results demonstrate a significant expansion of the journal over the past five years and highlight its global profile, with publications from around the world. Currently, Chinese researchers are the most productive, due to a significant increase in their contributions over the last five years.