Environmental justice: A panoptic overview using scientometrics

Since its initial introduction in the 1970s, the field of environmental justice (EJ) continues to grow, with significant contributions from the disciplines of sustainability science, geography, political science, public policy and administration, urban planning, law, and many others. Each of these disciplines approach EJ research from slightly different perspectives, but all offer unique and valuable insight to the EJ knowledge domain. Although the interdisciplinary nature of environmental justice should be viewed as a strength, it presents a challenge when attempting to both summarize and synthesize key contributions to the field, due to disciplinary bias, narrow subfield foci, or gaps in knowledge by a research team without a representative disciplinary composition. The purpose of this paper is to provide a succinct, panoptic review of key research contributions to environmental justice, while simultaneously minimizing common problems associated with traditional reviews. In particular, this paper explores the utility of co-citation network analysis, to provide insight into the most important subdomains of environmental justice research. The results suggest that while early EJ research is initially focused on environmental disamenities and a continued focus on race and inequality, the research gradually shifts to foci more concerned with environmental amenities, such as parks and greenspace. We also find that race and inequality remain an important and consist line of research over the duration of the study time period. Implications for environmental justice research and its allied subfields are discussed.