Interdisciplinarity Research in Sustainability: A 15 Year Bibliometric Analysis of Sustainability Journal

In 2024, Sustainability celebrates its 15th year of publication. To commemorate this milestone, this study presents a retrospective bibliometric analysis of the journal, utilizing data from the Scopus database. Through a range of bibliometric tools, we analyze Sustainability’s growth in terms of publication and citation impact. Citation data mainly were retrieved from Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature, comprising scientific journals, books, and conference proceedings. Additionally, data on the most downloaded articles were obtained from Sustainability’s official website. The most cited articles in Sustainability were identified along with the most prolific authors. As of 2023, Sustainability has achieved a CiteScore (CS) of 6.8 — an impressive 485% increase from its initial CS of 1.4 in 2011. The journal is indexed under multiple subject categories in Scopus, ranking as follows: Computer Networks and Communications – 95th out of 395 journals; Computer Science (miscellaneous) – 17th out of 133 journals; Energy Engineering and Power Technology - 69th out of 272 journals; Environmental Science (miscellaneous) – 36th out of 219 journals; Geography, Planning and Development – 94th out of 821 journals; Hardware and Architecture – 46th out of 177 journals; Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law – 89th out of 399 journals; and Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment – 97th out of 270 journals. Since its inception in 2009, Sustainability has published 65,636 articles from scholars worldwide, with the highest contributions from China and the United States. The journal has primarily published sustainability studies in various aspects, with a predominant emphasis on quantitative methodologies. Although widely used in academia, bibliometric methods might also prove useful in sustainability jurisprudence, such as helping people understand the publication trends in scholarly sustainability journals.