ABSTRACT
Water footprint has gained worldwide popularity in recent years. The bibliometric analysis on water footprint was performed to evaluate the global productivity over the past two decades (1993–2018). A total of 8,118 academic publications were extracted from the Web of Science database. This study determined the temporal distribution of publications, the most influential countries, organizations, authors, and journals. Based on the VOSviewer software for the construction of scientific maps, the co-authorship of organizations and authors and co-occurrence of terms were analyzed. The outcomes of the study showed that publication grew rapidly since the last 9 years. The United States was the country with the largest number of publications. Chinese Academy of Sciences was the most influential organization, and Hoekstra AY was the most influential author. We also discovered organizations and authors from China that had strong international collaboration. The Journal of Cleaner Production ranked first with 360 publications. Environmental Sciences was the major subject category, and Environmental Sciences Ecology was the major research area. Obviously, high-frequency keywords were water footprint and virtual water. Terms analysis revealed that “methods and models” and “assessment and evaluation” were two main research areas, which water footprint was focused on.
