Methodological refinement and cartography of environmental history scholarship: Intellectual trajectories,thematic evolution,and global dynamics (1968–2025)

Abstract

This study presents a rigorous bibliometric and methodological investigation into the evolving landscape of environmental history research from 1968 through 2025. Using a multi-stage filtration of 6557 Scopus-indexed records, the dataset was refined to 2286 peer-reviewed research articles that reflect the field’s interdisciplinarity across environmental science, the humanities, and the social sciences. Bibliometric mapping, using advanced tools such as CiteSpace, VOSviewer, and the bibliometrix package in R, reveals patterns in scholarly production, international collaboration, and thematic diversification. The field exhibits robust annual growth (7.66%), sustained citation impact (average 21.44 citations per document), and a predominance of Anglophone scholarship alongside significant contributions in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Russian. Cluster and trend analyses uncover distinct intellectual subfields – from paleoenvironmental reconstructions and historical ecology to emergent posthumanist and socio-political critiques – while thematic evolution highlights transitions from foundational environmental historiography to specialized, methodologically pluralistic, and globally resonant concerns, including climate change, biodiversity, and environmental humanities. Citation analysis identifies seminal works that shape the field’s theoretical and methodological contours, underscoring its critical engagement with ecological temporality, agency, and global socio-environmental transformations. This study advances an empirically grounded, computationally robust framework for understanding the disciplinary maturation and transnational scope of environmental history, emphasizing its pivotal role in addressing contemporary environmental challenges through historically informed interdisciplinary inquiry.