Evolution and Emerging Trends of Sustainability in Manufacturing Based on Literature Visualization Analysis

Sustainability is necessary for improving the quality of the manufacturing industry, which is an important pillar of the economy. The existing studies can hardly realize a comprehensive reflection of the research status of sustainability in manufacturing. Thus, this study adopts science mapping as the main research method for the systematic and accurate mastery of the overall research status, development track, research hotspots, and trends within this field. Moreover, this work provides a systematic review of related studies. This study examines 6,591 articles (1999-2019), including in core journals on Web of Science as research samples, and deeply explores core journal, core author, core country, discipline distribution, keyword co-occurrence, and literature co-citation via CiteSpace software. According to results, authoritative journals regarding sustainability in manufacturing place particular emphasis on theory, method, or application in different degrees. The number of published articles in the U.S.A. tops the ranking, and the influence of Chinese research institutes and scholars is continuously enhanced, where the main research fields are engineering, environmental science, and so on. Sustainable innovativeness in the manufacturing industry is generally at a high level. Moreover, research hotspots have evolved from traditional to modern and undergone three phases: theory construction-industry or enterprise technology construction-the emergence of new problems and application of new technologies. This study further analyzes the four clusters with citation bursts, namely, additive manufacturing, power consumption, green supply chain, and green information system in terms of grasping the knowledge structures and probing the classical research results. Future research should emphasize 3D printing design and application in the information era, the business model integrating the manufacturing industry and service industry, optimization of production modeling, and so on. This study aims to provide a systematic, comprehensive, dynamic, and objective review of the literature on sustainability in manufacturing to deepen and perfect the research in this field.