Although the sustainability movement began to take shape in the early nineteen seventies, it was not until 1987 with the publication of the Brundtland Report that it acquired institutional recognition. The academic community's engagement with the movement came a few years later in the form of sustainability science, which developed and consolidated in keeping with the dynamics of any new scientific discipline. This review analyses its development based on the papers listed in the web of science (WoS) category 'Green and sustainable science and technology'. The bibliometric methodology used included social network and multivariate analysis focusing on journal, discipline and subject inter-relationships to map and analyse developments in this new field. The main findings identified four clusters of journals with different patterns of development: sustainability, renewable energies, green chemistry and green ecology. Mainstream and emerging subjects were determined on the grounds of co-word analysis.

Peer reviewed