Renewable Energy Technologies and Sustainable Physics: A Bibliometric Analysis of Global Research Trends (2015–2025)
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The decade from 2015 to 2025 transformed renewable-energy research from a collection of technology-specific specialties into a densely connected field concerned with power-system integration, materials supply, life-cycle performance, digital control, and social legitimacy. This paper presents a bibliometric synthesis of that transformation through a triangulated analysis of published Web of Science and Scopus studies, official deployment statistics, and a structured science-mapping interpretation. The principal quantitative backbone is a Web of Science corpus of 8,349 articles on renewable energy and sustainable development, assembled through November 2022, supplemented by a Scopus-based corpus of 19,511 publications on mathematical modelling in biomass and wind systems through 2024 and by 2024-2025 deployment evidence. The analysis examines publication growth, source concentration, international collaboration, thematic evolution, and the changing position of solar photovoltaics, wind energy, storage, hydrogen, microgrids, and sustainability assessment. Results show a marked acceleration after 2015, a shift after 2018 from device efficiency toward integrated energy systems, and a post-2021 emphasis on storage, green hydrogen, artificial intelligence, critical materials, and circularity. China emerged as the dominant publication and collaboration node, while the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and European research systems remained influential in citation and network centrality. Yet bibliometric prominence and sustainable impact are not equivalent. The literature still underrepresents durability, climate resilience, end-of-life recovery, distributional justice, and research conditions in low-income regions. A sustainable-physics perspective therefore requires that energy yield, entropy generation, embodied emissions, material stocks, and institutional context be studied in the same analytical frame. The paper concludes with a research agenda for physics-informed, data-transparent, and geographically inclusive renewable-energy scholarship.
Author: Dr. Sunil Kumar
Language: English
Subfield: Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7166319865
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