Mapping Six Years of Green, Blue and Circular Economy Research Across Agri-Food and Aquaculture Value Chains

A bibliometric analysis of nearly two thousand scientific publications has mapped how research on green, blue, and circular economy approaches to agri-food and aquaculture value chains evolved between 2020 and 2025, revealing a field in the midst of a pronounced transition. The study, published in the Springer journal Carbon Neutral Systems, shows that scholarship once dominated by environmental impact assessment and production-level efficiency has shifted decisively toward integrated, system-level approaches emphasizing cross-stage coordination, circular resource flows, and technology-enabled sustainability solutions.

The research team, led by Qalbin Salim Fazli with colleagues including Haikal Aziz, Yoshihiro Hamaguchi, Dimas Bagus Wiranatakusuma, Shanshan Yue, Irsan Hardi, and Ghalieb Mutig Idroes, retrieved bibliographic records from the Scopus database on 5 January 2026. Their search combined terms for agriculture, agribusiness, and aquaculture with sustainability paradigms such as green economy, blue economy, and circular economy, alongside environmental and value chain vocabulary. The initial unrestricted search returned 392,382 documents; refinement to the title-abstract-keyword field reduced this to 3,511 records. Restricting the dataset to journal articles, documents in the final publication stage, and English-language publications produced a final corpus of 1,832 documents covering 2020 through 2025.

The authors chose this six-year window deliberately to capture post-pandemic transformations in food systems, including accelerated digitalization, growing emphasis on resilience and traceability, the expansion of circular bioeconomy initiatives, and the rising prominence of blue economy and carbon-neutral transition agendas. Because the period is short, the study focuses on recent thematic developments rather than long-term historical evolution, a limitation the team acknowledges alongside the restriction to a single database and language.

To analyze the corpus, the researchers combined two widely used bibliometric tools: VOSviewer version 1.6.20 and CiteSpace version 6.4.R2. VOSviewer constructed keyword co-occurrence and collaboration networks from author keywords using full counting, and produced overlay visualizations based on average publication year to reveal which themes were relatively mature and which were newer. CiteSpace detected burst keywords—terms experiencing sudden increases in scholarly attention—using one-year time slices, author keywords as the node type, and a g-index selection criterion with a scale factor of k = 10. Before interpretation, the team manually cleaned the keyword set, removing generic expressions and database-generated indexing artefacts, and validated cluster labels through examination of dominant keywords and thematic coherence.

The descriptive results confirm rapid growth. Publications rose steadily across the 2020–2025 period, signaling expanding scholarly interest in sustainability across agri-food and aquaculture systems. Citation counts were highest for earlier publication years, a pattern the authors attribute to citation accumulation time rather than differences in research importance. Environmental Science and Agricultural and Biological Sciences emerged as the dominant subject areas, with substantial contributions from Engineering, Energy, Business, Management, and Social Sciences, underscoring the field’s interdisciplinary character. Geographically, China and the United States were the most productive countries, followed by the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, and Spain, and leading institutions included Wageningen University & Research, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Agricultural University, and INRAE. The most productive journals were Sustainability, Science of the Total Environment, and the Journal of Cleaner Production, though the authors caution that the broad scope and high volume of some outlets may partly explain their representation.

Cited reference co-citation analysis revealed a dense, interconnected intellectual landscape organized into six macro-intellectual streams. These encompass environmental assessment and life cycle analysis; circular economy and value retention strategies; planetary boundary and food system perspectives; digitalization and smart agri-aqua systems; sustainability-oriented aquaculture research emphasizing value chain restructuring and environmental performance; and policy- and governance-related frameworks. The interconnectedness of the co-citation network suggests the field evolved by integrating concepts and methods from different disciplinary domains rather than along isolated trajectories, with environmental assessment and circular economy-oriented streams playing particularly central roles.

Author keyword co-occurrence analysis identified thematic clusters spanning the full length of the value chain. Production-oriented clusters covered mainstream agricultural sustainability baselines and nature-based solutions such as agroecology, agroforestry, and biodiversity-oriented farming. Integration-oriented clusters addressed sustainable supply-chain coordination, agribusiness models and value creation, and barriers and enablers of sustainable agri-food value chains. A circularity cluster captured waste treatment, recovery, and valorization pathways, including waste-to-value strategies, bioenergy production, and material recovery. Distinct clusters highlighted artificial intelligence–enabled sustainability transitions, big data–driven supply chain optimization, and blue economy and sustainable aquaculture value chains, the latter signaling growing convergence between terrestrial and aquatic food system research.

The temporal overlay and burst analyses charted a clear progression. Early bursts in 2020–2021 clustered around digital technologies and assessment tools, including agricultural robots, supply chains, and life cycle assessment. Bursts extending into 2023–2025 shifted toward applied, production-specific challenges: manure, greenhouse gas emissions, ecosystem services, livestock farming, pesticide use, and crop-specific terms such as rice showed strong and sustained attention, indicating growing focus on environmental impacts, resource management, and emission mitigation at production and value chain levels. Synthesizing these signals, the authors identified five emerging research topics: digital and AI-enabled sustainable agri-food value chains; circular bioeconomy strategies and livestock waste valorization; environmental footprinting and ecosystem-based assessment; resilient food systems and socio-economic sustainability; and sustainability challenges in aquaculture and integrated crop–livestock systems.

In its discussion, the team argues the field is maturing from fragmented, sector- and method-specific studies toward a coherent, value chain–based sustainability logic in which assessment tools, circular economy strategies, digital technologies, and governance frameworks function as complementary components. They note that identified themes correspond strongly to Sustainable Development Goals 2, 12, 13, and 14 and to expanding Environmental, Social, and Governance assessment priorities. They also flag underexplored trade-offs of digitalization, including potential increases in energy consumption, technological dependency, electronic waste, and unequal access across regions.

The analysis identifies persistent gaps: reliance on static, retrospective environmental assessment methods; fragmentation of circular bioeconomy research across sectors; limited integration of digital infrastructures with sustainability assessment and governance; treatment of socio-economic dimensions as context rather than core analysis; and an underdeveloped evidence base for aquaculture and integrated crop–livestock systems, uneven across regions. As a bibliometric mapping of published literature, the study characterizes research patterns rather than measuring real-world environmental outcomes, and its findings are bounded by Scopus coverage, English-language journal articles, and metadata quality. Within those limits, the authors offer the synthesis as a conceptual foundation for positioning future research on sustainable production–consumption systems within broader green, blue, and circular economy transitions.

Subject of Research: Bibliometric analysis of green, blue, and circular economy research in agri-food and aquaculture value chains from 2020 to 2025

Article Title: Green, blue, and circular economy research in agri-food and aquaculture value chains: a bibliometric analysis

Article References: Fazli, Q. S., Aziz, H., Hamaguchi, Y., Wiranatakusuma, D. B., Yue, S., Hardi, I., & Idroes, G. M. (2026). Green, blue, and circular economy research in agri-food and aquaculture value chains: a bibliometric analysis. Carbon Neutral Systems, 2(1), Article 10. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44438-026-00031-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44438-026-00031-5

Keywords: bibliometric analysis, agri-food value chains, aquaculture, circular economy, green economy, blue economy, Scopus, keyword co-occurrence, citation bursts, digitalization, waste valorization, sustainability transitions