Dispersion and Disparity: Bibliometric and Visualized Analysis of Research on Climate Change Science Communication

Abstract

Research on climate change science communication began in the 1980s and is showing continued vitality and a wider interest at present. In order to track the development of global research on the communication of climate change hot topics and frontier progress since the 21st century, methods such as bibliometrics and co-word network analysis were used to analyze the publication of research papers in this field, and a total of 1175 valid papers published in 2000–2021 in the WOS core database were counted. Different dimensions such as temporal trend, spatial distribution, and author collaboration network were analyzed. The results show that, (1) climate change communication research has become a relatively independent research field and has entered a rapid development stage, and this field still has a broad research prospect in the new understanding of climate change and new international context. (2) At present, research in this field is still dominated by developed countries, but developing countries are actively building their unique climate communication discourse. (3) Public understanding and media information presentation have been hot topics in climate communication research in recent years. In the context of changing international situations and the development of global epidemics and new climate policies, changes in national actions will likely lead to new research topics and dialogues. Research shows that climate change science communication research is increasingly showing a trend of decentralization and differentiation.