Alternative economies: a bibliometric analysis of new horizons to rethink the future

Abstract

Alternative Economies have progressively become a topic of interest for the scientific community, both for being a multidisciplinary topic that encompasses a large number of areas of study, mainly economic sciences and geography, and for the possibility of approaching and structuring other possible ways of conceptualizing economic and social development. Thus, through a bibliographic search carried out in Web Of Science, the main research platform together with Scopus, a bibliometric analysis was developed, established in a period of time between 1928 and 2023, obtaining as a final search 3723 results on scientific documents pertaining to the field of study of Alternative Economies (AE). This analysis allowed us to establish the most influential and productive authors, institutions, countries, publications and journals in the field of AE, and the use of VOSviewer software allowed us to develop a scientific mapping where we analyzed the co-occurrence of keywords used by the authors, which were grouped into clusters that we analyzed, thus establishing the topics with the greatest production and importance within the field of AE. Among which we note the importance that terms such as Collaborative Economy and Circular Economy, which are currently so popular in the media, have gained in scientific production. Finally, in order to contribute to the debate on EC, we have drawn both the conclusions and the limitations that we found in carrying out this bibliometric analysis and the possible future lines that can be developed on the subject.