Co-authorship in energy justice studies: Assessing research collaboration through social network analysis and topic modeling

Diverse research collaboration is important to perform innovative science and drive transformational change. In the field of energy justice, the need for transformative team science is no longer bigger, given the urgency of a just energy transition. This study is the first research utilizing social network analysis (SNA) and computational methods to understand the structure of scientific collaboration networks around energy justice, while also exploring existing research topics in the field. The bibliographic data were obtained from Web of Science (1975-2021), including the information of 192 journal articles. Based on the linear regression quadratic assignment procedure (LR-QAP), this study shows that pairs of authors who share the same country (i.e., where an author's institution/affiliation is located) are significantly more likely to collaborate with each other. In addition, according to different actor-level centrality measures, this paper identifies the top four leading authors, who are all within the giant component of the network (about 17.07% of all nodes). Results of topic modeling also show that the articles authored or coauthored by the scholars involved in the giant component can capture all identified topics, suggesting the efficacy of the giant component and the significant impact of leading scientists on shaping hot research topics in the field. This study calls for more research collaboration across different countries in the energy justice research community, which can result in more comparative studies, especially the ones exploring energy justice issues between developing and developed countries. It also calls for a more decentralized network open to outside connections to diversify research collaboration, thus enriching research topics and advancing innovative work on energy justice.