A Bibliometric Analysis of Current Knowledge Structure and Research Progress Related to Sustainable Furniture Design Systems

Abstract

Sustainable furniture design has emerged as a prominent area of research, focusing on the interrelationships among people, furniture, and the environment. Despite being in its nascent stage, this field has garnered attention from scholars across disciplinary boundaries, seeking to explore new opportunities for industrial development and innovative perspectives. The objective of this paper is to clarify the extent of the current research literature, present the current significant themes, and elaborate further on the developed and potential future research directions in sustainable furniture design. In this research, a systematic analysis of bibliometric performance and scientific mapping of literature on sustainable furniture design was carried out by examining 1578 published papers from 2002 to 2023 selected from the Web of Science database, utilizing BibliometrixR package, VOSviewer, and CiteSpace tools for the analysis. The findings indicate a marked increase in research output in this area since 2012, with China being the primary contributor, although not achieving the highest citation rates. Furthermore, the study identifies 713 instances of international collaborations among researchers from 81 countries, with China and the United States being the most frequent partners. The research direction of highly cited literature, journals with the most published papers on sustainable furniture design, and authors with high total citation rates indicate a prominent connection between sustainable furniture design and fields such as product technical science, environmental science, ecology, and material research. The analysis of co-citation and keywords reveals the evolution of research themes, these key issues include furniture-human body scale match, furniture structure and performance, lifecycle, carbon emissions reduction, furniture industry chain, artificial intelligence, new development, school furniture safety and quality, and furniture strength and load capacity, with the focus shifting from the ontology of furniture and the human body to the external scope, emphasizing the connection with life, the environment, and the future. The latest research highlights industry chains, artificial intelligence, and innovative development, reflecting the trends of future research topics as “multi-dimensional integration”, “health and intelligence”, and “environment and system” will be the direction for the next stage.