A bibliometric analysis of comparative research on the evolution of international and Chinese ecological footprint research hotspots and frontiers since 2000

The ecological footprint (EF) methodology, which is a tool for evaluating the natural resource use level and regional carrying capacity, has been extensively used to measure the capacity to reach both an ecological supply and demand balance and a level of sustainable development. In this study, to systematically sort and analyse the distribution of EF research, its hot areas and the evolution of its fronts, papers with ecological footprint as the subject term in the Web of Science Core Collection Database and the China Knowledge Resource Integrated Database Core Journals since 2000 are visually analysed using CiteSpace. The characteristics of these papers, including the quantity trend, quality, author group, affiliated institution type and journal type, are summarized, and keyword co-appearance and paper co-citation knowledge maps are produced. The results show the following: (1) Chinese researchers have been closely following international research fronts and steadily improving their research results. (2) Hotspots such as carbon dioxide emissions, the carbon footprint (CF), water footprint (WF) and sustainable use have been receiving attention both in China and internationally. International researchers focus on hot topics such as public satisfaction, land and resource use, spatial equity and policy analysis. In comparison, Chinese researchers prefer to modify and improve relevant methods, such as the three-dimensional EF (3D EF) and footprint family methods. (3) The research frontier of EF is based on improving the EF accounting method, which is aimed at assessing and monitoring the relationship between ecology and the economic society on a multi-scale basis, establishing an index system that can evaluate the demand for natural resources and environmental pressure, and explore the issues of mechanisms of regional ecology resource allocation fairness, and market-led and government-led ecological governance efficiency.