A Review of Global Research Trends on Sustainable Manufacturing

The growing need for ‘sustainable development’ and the existence of monumental wastes and unsustainable patterns have made scientific movements worldwide towards an emerging paradigm—Sustainable Manufacturing—which is also regarded as an application of the circularity principle to production under the emergent concept of circular economy. To create a significant outlook, however, understanding the topics of concern and giving the opportunity of widening collaboration networks are required. As such, this research aims to analyse the research trends in the sustainable manufacturing area using the bibliometric analytic method. The data for this study was extracted from the Scopus database until May 2021 based on the descriptive data of publication outputs, resulting in retrieving a total of 4802 journal articles reported between 1979 and 2021. The analysis revealed that the published documents were continuously increased every year since 2006, accordingly there was a dramatic growth in the cumulative total publications hitherto. This indicates the growing global interests of the scientific community in sustainable manufacturing, expecting to continue to rise due to its unique intellectual contributor to ‘our common future’. The United States and China were the two core contributing countries, respectively, with a large number of publications and strong collaboration networks. About 40% of the total research articles from the top ten journals were published in the Journal of Cleaner Production. Some areas newly investigated with sustainable manufacturing, which would be potential interesting topics for future research, were also discussed.