Circular Economy and Digital Innovation Practices for Sustainability-A Bibliometric Analysis

Purpose: Circular economy (CE) and digital innovation (DI) are abstract ideas of sustainable development. After the declaration of the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs) in 2015, research on CE, DI and sustainability has gained popularity among academia and researchers. This study seeks to present an in-depth examination and explanation of the status of existing literature in this field. Methodology: The data, 1684 documents were selected through scientific literature search from Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) for the period 2016-2023. Various bibliometric tools, biblioshiny and VOSviewer were used to analyze the gathered data for the descriptive and bibliometric analyses and to probe the research questions. Findings: From the bibliometric and content analysis, findings suggest that the development of current circularity and innovation practices leading to sustainability is steadily increasing with an extremely high annual growth rate (161.63%). About 96.67% of articles were published in the period (2020-2023), it infers that this is a trendy topic. Another finding implies that the topic has been pioneered by European countries, UK, Italy and Germany and has recently become prominence in China and India in developing economy. The data also shows that in wealthy nations, there is a significant author-country collaboration. Moreover, the result of co-occurrence analysis indicates that ‘sustainability’, ‘circular economy’, ‘industry 4.0’ and ‘digitalization’ are the emerging co-words in this field. So, the field is still new in the emerging economy. Practical Implications: The outcome of this paper will provide a helpful starting point for policymakers, academics and industrial people for making more informative decisions towards digitalization and sustainability in the circular economy environment. Research Limitations: The limitation of the study is that it cannot infer the generalized findings as it considers only two databases and English literature. Further research can be done to explore and measure the quantitative assessment of circularity, sustainability, industry 4.0 and digitalization domain.