Mapping research on carbon emissions trading: a co-citation analysis

Carbon emissions trading (CET) is a market mechanism, aims to promote the control of globe greenhouse-gas emissions. It is an important part of international environmental cooperation and it is also the important application research filed of environmental economics and institutional economics. There is a very obvious phenomenon that the publications about CET increasing year by year. This paper adopts the scientometric analysis method to assess the current state and explore the development trends of carbon emission trading domain based on the literature data retrieved from Web of Science. The research results of this paper could answer the following questions clearly. 1) Which subject category is the most popular in CET research area? Which journal published the most number of articles in this area? Which institution and country is the most productive in CET domain? 2) What are the major research areas and what documents are the most cited? Which journal are the most representative in CET research domain? 3) What are the new emerging trends and development in CET research area? On the whole, the research method in this paper provided a fresh research approach to assess the performance of CET research. The findings may help for the new researchers to pick out the most relevant articles, journals, institutions and seize the research frontier in CET field.