Surveying the landscape of environmental social science: a bibliometric and network analysis

Social science research on the environment has grown exponentially in the past four decades alongside increasing awareness that environmental risks, such as climate change, cannot be understood by natural science interventions alone. While prior research examines how specific disciplines, like sociology, have attended to the environment or how specific problems have been engaged across disciplines, less attention has been offered to the entire landscape of research on the environment in the social sciences. In this article, we ask: What is the landscape of environmental social science? Focusing on 124,906 social scientific articles from the Web of Science, we analyze the relationship between journals publishing research on the environment. Specifically, we construct journal citation networks and topic models on bibliographic records from 1990 to 2022. Results suggest that journals form coherent communities associated with both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research topics, indicating that journal communities may be a central organizing feature of ESS. Moreover, research topics prevalent in this field have changed over time, potentially in relation to the ongoing neoliberalization of climate change politics. As scholars want to influence policy and industrial practice, their research implicitly reflects values consistent with the current political economic order. We conclude by highlighting the implications of these findings for the field of environmental social science.


Introduction
Climate change, among other environmental problems, has drawn considerable attention from the social science research community.While these risks may, on their face, seem in the sole purview of the natural sciences, social science research outlines the social, political, and economic foundations of environmental risks.Accordingly, research on the environment in the social sciences has grown exponentially in the past four decades, coinciding with the awareness that the problems of climate change are not only technical but also shaped by our social structures.Thus, on an empirical level, it is worth assessing what topics and issues the field of environmental social science (ESS) is predominantly organized around.While most bibliometric research highlights the contours of disciplinary areas of focus or issue-based cross-disciplinary topics (e.g., Qin et al 2020, Yue et al 2020), less attention has been paid to the entire landscape of research on the environment in the social sciences.
Recent work on interdisciplinarity highlights the importance and challenge of coordination when addressing complex problems across research domains (Centellas et al 2014, Leahey 2016, Adams et al 2020).Scientists struggle to communicate broadly given their training in highly specialized and discipline-specific languages and face additional epistemic challenges when they seek to contribute to interdisciplinary problemsolving.ESS presents a salient case for observing how interdisciplinary coordination and integration occurs as (1) it is more bounded than environmental science in its totality (including both natural and social sciences) and (2) consists of research fields that have very different assumptions and engage in substantially different research practices.Recently, ESS has also enjoyed significant growth that encourages a dynamic view of how the interdisciplinary field has changed over time, and whether topical convergence has emerged across research domains.
We use Web of Science (WoS) article-level data to observe the organization of ESS research.An iterative data sorting process resulted in a dataset consisting of records on ESS from 1990 to 2022.We conduct a variety of analyses on these data, including structural topic modeling and network analyses on journal-to-journal citation and WoS field-to-field networks.Results suggest that journals form coherent communities associated with both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research topics, research topics prevalent in this field have changed over time, and that these changes may be related to the ongoing neoliberalization of climate change politics.We conclude by highlighting the implications of these findings for the field of ESS.

Interdisciplinarity, ESS, and the sociology of science
The increasing complexity of social life, in part due to technological advances, is commingled with pressing social problems, such as climate change, political division, and rapid, global disease diffusion.Understandably, social scientists across disciplinary domains tend to gravitate toward such issues as they are timely and policyrelevant.However, due to their complexity, these issues also transcend the boundaries of disciplinary silos, thus necessitating multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, or even transdisciplinary approaches (Klein 2010).Multidisciplinarity consists of research that substantively engages in a single problem but from several disciplines with relatively little overlap.Disciplinary structures are largely intact with minimum crossfertilization across disciplines.Interdisciplinarity, on the other hand, is a dynamic and multidimensional project that involves boundary work on the edges of established disciplines to leverage the strength of different disciplines (Gondal 2011, Light and Adams (2016).Transdisciplinarity breaks down the wall between academia and the wider public featuring direct partnerships between scientists and policy or activist communities or a 'science with society' framework (Steger et al 2021).Complex social problems, like environmental problems, require significant transdisciplinary engagement, but in the context of science itself, these complex problems require multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity.
ESS focuses on humans, our social systems, and the natural environment surrounding us.As a field of study, ESS encompasses subfields of established disciplines and thematic topic areas.Social scientists became increasingly interested in environmental issues since the formation of consensus on anthropogenic climate change (Oreskes 2004), as the human-induced nature of the problem implies that the structure of our political institutions, built infrastructures, and economic system may be contributing to it (Steffen et al 2018).With this in mind, ESS also includes significant interdisciplinary research where researchers draw from multiple disciplines or form teams consisting of scientists from multiple disciplines to better understand environmental problems.The institutionalization of ESS into the fabric of academia is visible in research institutes dedicated to society and ecology, university programs in environmental studies and sciences, and interdisciplinary journals exploring topics under ESS's umbrella.Considering the exigent threat of impending climate change, it is important to understand and assess the social organization of ESS to see what arenas of social life it focuses on, whether certain topics have emerged as dominant in the space, whether these factors have changed over time, and whether these changes may reflect larger trends on environmental issues in non-academic spaces.
The 'science of science' investigates the social foundations of scientific inquiry, an exercise in reflexivity on behalf of researchers (Fortunato et al 2018).Bibliometric analysis is a common method employed to understand the social organization of science, as it focuses on the written outputs of the research process.Within the bounds of studies on ESS, a bevy of studies use bibliometric methods.However, the vast majority of these draw the contours of their study space around specific thematic topics within ESS.To illustrate just a few, bibliometric examinations of human-environmental topics include approaches to carbon accounting (Zheng et al 2022), environmentally-induced migration (Priovashini and Mallick 2022), linkages between immigration and environmental harm (Anuar et al 2022), poverty levels and environmental degradation (Burki et al 2021), and the intersection of the environment, ecology, and politics (Borrett et al 2018, Gao et al 2021).Meta-analyses of scientific knowledge production in the ESS space also examine subfields within academic disciplines, such as environmental and natural resource sociology (Bohr andDunlap 2018, Qin et al 2020) and ecological economics (Castro e Silva and Teixeira 2011).While these studies shed valuable insights into academic subfields and topics within ESS, to the best of our knowledge no research to date has used bibliometric analysis to unveil the broad landscape of the ESS space in its entirety.
While ESS is essential to understanding how to change our social, economic, and political systems to better integrate sustainable practices, vested interests maintain significant control over how environmental issues are framed, regulated, and legislated (McCright and Dunlap 2010, Lucier and Gareau 2015, Farrell 2016).In general, corporate interests may thus also shape the framing of some academic treatments of environmental problems, as the intellectual desire to affect public policy and the need for expertise in regulating and managing modern societies may produce similar dynamics on the pathway to producing pragmatic and solutions-oriented scholarship (Moore et al 2011).Of course, it is important to note that science is a relatively independent sphere, and is undertaken for a variety of non-economic purposes as well (Moore et al 2011).While some have examined the more nefarious ways in which powerful corporate interests employ science and scientific discourses to achieve their goals (e.g., McCright andDunlap 2003, Light et al 2021), we might also expect a more seemingly benign pathway, where the scientific inclination to produce actionable and policy-relevant research reflects wider trends associated with the neoliberal economic order given the primacy of energy corporations in this politico-economic realm (Farrell 2016).In parallel, neoliberalism as ideology concerns the deepening of marketbased logics and values into everyday life (in this case, scientific practice) (Ganti 2014).Thus, we might expect ESS research to take on questions of the market in efforts to achieve sustainability both because we exist in a political-economic context where interaction with markets is necessary to produce policy-relevant findings and because researchers may increasingly valorize the environment in market terms.Systematically examining the ESS landscape can provide some insight into the trajectory of research in this interdisciplinary space, and how political-economic contexts may shape it, alongside other factors.Our analysis aims to understand what the emergent topics are and to see how they map on to the practical social and political challenges climate change and environmental issues pose.To these ends, we ask the following questions that pertain to interrelations between research topics, journal communities, and disciplinarity: how has the field of ESS developed over time?
In conjunction, has the substantive content of research changed in alignment with the need to produce actionable, policy-relevant material in a neoliberal political-economic order?Finally, how do journal communities correspond to disciplines and emergent topics of research developed within and across disciplines?

Data and methods
We use Web of Science (WoS) article-level data to observe the structure of ESS over time.Capturing research on the environment presents a bibliometric challenge due to the several uses of the 'environment' in the social sciences from the natural environment to the purely social environment (n = 579,926).We developed a systematic strategy to preserve articles on the former while removing those articles that are exclusively on the latter.To do so, we first downloaded every article that contains the word 'environment' in the title, keywords, abstract, or subject area of the Social Sciences Citation Index in the WoS.We included all articles published in journals that were in the environmental studies subject area or listed in the Wikipedia entry on ESS journals ('List of environmental social science journals 2023).Next, we included all articles that cited at least three articles published in either the environmental studies subject area or the Wikipedia list.Last, we removed articles published in MDPI journals as these journals operate differently than most others, including a vastly higher rate of publication and self-citation.This results in a corpus of 188,904 articles published on the environment in the social sciences from 1990 to 20224 .We use social network analysis, specifically community detection, to identify an emergent set of social science-specific journals by field, as we discuss below, and the majority of the analysis uses this subset of 124,906 article records5 .
To construct a comprehensive picture of ESS literature, we develop a multi-faceted analytic strategy.First, we examine the relationship between fields.Fields are journal-level tags that WoS assigns to every journal.Multiple fields can be assigned to a journal and fields generally translate into well-known disciplines or subdisciplines, like economics or geography.For the entire corpus, we generate a field-to-field network (nodes are fields, ties indicate co-occurrence in a single journal record) and use network community detection to visualize the structure of the corpus overall.We use this network to center the articles associated with the field community that contains the fields most strongly associated with the social sciences as WoS takes a very broad view.Second, digging deeper into this core social science community, we use structural topic modeling to understand the content of these articles and how the content of the corpus has changed over time.Specifically, we run structural topic models over the words in the titles, keywords, and abstracts for each journal by 5-year period.Topic models, a popular method to locate patterns in text data, 'reverse engineer' the article writing process by looking at how words co-appear in a text to identify what the article is 'about' (Mohr and Bogdanov 2013).The intuition is that each journal discusses a set of topics using words associated with those topics; however, we can only observe the articles or abstracts in the journals themselves and not the hidden or latent topic structure of the entire corpus or collection of texts.In topic models, such as latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) (Blei 2012), this structure arises from a probabilistic process whereby each word has a likelihood of occurring in topics and documents consist of a distribution of topics based on the words that they contain.Structural topic models, a popular extension of LDA, allow the topic model to include covariates, in this case, publication period accounting for how topics change over time (Roberts et al 2014, Karell andFreedman 2019).Importantly, topic models do not provide a single correct number of topics for a corpus but require careful decision-making to determine the appropriate number of topics.Several useful strategies exist for selecting the number of topics (Weston et al 2023).In this case, we compared held-out likelihood, residuals, and semantic coherence alongside an iterative qualitative comparison of topic solutions following Weston et al (2023) to arrive at a 15-topic solution (see appendix A).Third, we construct journal-to-journal citation networks to understand the citation structure of the corpus.We run the Louvain network community detection algorithm over the network to identify the structure of ESS (Blondel et al 2008). 6Fourth, we decompose each network community by canonical social science disciplines (i.e., anthropology and economics) to examine the distribution of clusters by discipline.Last, we examine the relationship between the journal citation structure and the content or topics with the corpus by constructing a correlational heatmap of journal communities by topics.

Results
In general, we aim to show relationships between research topics, journal communities, and social science disciplines in ESS.To do this, we first show the broadest contours of ESS and the relative amount of publication through time, and then delve into relationships between topics, communities, and disciplines to assess where interdisciplinarity is prevalent in ESS and how research topics have changed through time.

The organization and temporal development of ESS WOS field-to-field network
To understand the landscape of ESS, we captured the widest possible perspective of the field.We downloaded every possible article addressing the topic of the environment within the social science index of WoS (which, itself, takes a broad view of social science).Figure 1 presents the satellite view of this literature.The network presents field-to-field relationships within the ESS corpus.The network of 229 fields with 1,571 edges is not dense (0.06), signaling modest field overlap among journals in this corpus.The community detection algorithm identifies four communities within the network.While the density score may lead one to conclude that this field network indicates strong disciplinarity (there is little overall connectivity between fields), the field-to-field network's modularity -a measure of the extent of overlap between communities in a network where a score towards 1 indicates little overlap between communities -is relatively low (0.42) indicating that the fields are organized into distinct groups that are simultaneously quite connected to one another as we can see in the figure.The communities are substantively varied in surprising ways with three communities that are outside of canonical social sciences.For example, the southeast community consists of fields related primarily to engineering, while the northwest community consists of public health fields, including some interdisciplinary fields linking biomedicine and public health.The two remaining communities illustrate the environmental science/environmental studies divide with the southwest environmental science community loading highly on environmental science itself as well as numerous natural science fields.Alternatively, the most frequent field in the northeast community is environmental studies and the community includes fields related to canonical social sciences (e.g., economics, political science, and so on).While the field-to-field network is not very dense, the moderate modularity score indicates that communities do share ties within and between communities, suggesting that the located communities (environmental sciences; environmental studies; environmental health; engineering) play a significant role in organizing the overall area of study.
WOS field-to-field communities over time Figure 2 shows the number of articles published in journals tagged with these fields over time.The corpus has grown from 200 articles in 1990 to 17,008 articles in 2022.This tremendous growth tracks with scholarly and political interest in the environment over time (e.g., Frank et al 2000).Based on the field network, the two predominant areas in ESS are the environmental studies community with canonical social science disciplines and the environmental science community consisting of fields most associated with canonical natural science disciplines.The overall number of articles in ESS declined from 2021 to 2022 and this decline appears to result primarily from fewer articles in the environmental science field.The marked decline could arise from a number of factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic or from shifts in tagging by WoS.We caution against interpreting this decline as substantive without data on future years.Together, figures 1 and 2 show the simultaneous diversity and growth of publications in the ESS corpus.

ESS Research topics over time
Turning to the contribution of canonical social science, in the following analyses we retain articles published in journals tagged with at least one field identified in the environmental studies community.First, we categorize the content of the research on environmental studies by running a structural topic model over the abstract, title, and keywords of the articles in each journal in the reduced corpus over 5-year periods.Figure 3 presents the 15-topic solution focusing on how the topic structure has changed from 1990-20227 .In this figure, the topics are labeled by their three top-loading terms.In the early time periods, 'pollution, economics, and trade' dominates the scientific space, consisting of work on issues like international free-rider problems in pollution abatement compliance (among other issues) influenced by foundational economic concepts (Coase 1960, Buchanan andTullock 1965) and other, more critical articles in line with influential research on the economic system's impacts on the environment (e.g., Georgescu-Roegen 1971, Schnaiberg 1980, Martínez-Alier 2003).Other prevalent topics at the beginning of the study period include 'geographies, political ecology, geography,' 'temperature, variability, climate,' and 'education, environmental education, children,' consistent with the newly-formed consensus on climate science and the need to educate children, and people more generally, on environmental issues to promote environmental concern and action.Through time, topic diversity increases, as the prevalence of topics becomes more dispersed.Particularly, increases in the prevalence of research on the topics of 'financial performance, corporate social-responsibility, supply chain management,' 'innovation, entrepreneurship, technology,' and 'co2 emissions, energy efficiency, energy-consumption' showcase how environmental problems became increasingly framed as technical issues, to be resolved with improved corporate practices or the implementation of more environmentally-friendly and innovative technological systems.Scholarship on 'law, democracy, politics' and 'adaptation, vulnerability, adaptive capacity' also increases over time, as the need for national and international governance of climate change and other environmental problems becomes clearer.Diversification of topics in general reflects how academic domains respond to the permeation of environmental problems into virtually all spheres of social, political, and economic life.Meanwhile, the marked attention to technology and corporate practices specifically may indicate a downstream response aligning with a tendency for scholars to produce actionable research in a climate action regime restricted by the practical limitations of preexisting energy and infrastructural systems and political limitations concerning the influence of vested corporate interests in maintaining those systems.
Interdisciplinarity: journal communities as an organizing feature of ESS Journal-to-journal citation network Next, we turn to the structure of research on ESS through a journal-to-journal citation network.Journal citation networks have been a fundamental component of mapping knowledge domains for decades due to the tractability of journal-to-journal network tracing because databases disambiguate journal names, but also for the substantive reason that journals represent idea spaces that scholars often thoughtfully engage by crafting papers for particular outlets (Moody andLight 2006, Chen 2008).Interdisciplinary research can occur in the journal-to-journal network in multiple ways.For example, journals may have interdisciplinary identities and draw work from a range of disciplines.Alternatively, authors may draw from an interdisciplinary set of journals when building their research published in a more disciplinary outlet.To evaluate the way that interdisciplinarity (or disciplinarity) unfolds in the ESS context, we construct the journal-to-journal network as seen in figure 4 where the nodes are journals (n = 2,048) and the edges (e = 290,558) are the extent to which they cite one another.The density of the journal-to-journal network (0.09) indicates sparse connections between journals.
We also run a community detection algorithm over this network inductively identifying 7 groups.The modularity of the network given this community structure (0.19) suggests a high level of overlap across groups consistent with interdisciplinarity.To better understand and label these groups, we inspected the journals that had high citations with the most articles in the corpus within each community.The top-5 journals for each journal community based on these criteria are labeled in the graph.There is a varying amount of overlap between journal communities.Psychology and Communication is a fairly independent area of research, while Environmental Policy & Law and Sustainability overlap considerably.There is also modest community overlap between Geography and Environmental Economics, perhaps suggesting that journal communities are relatively autonomous and coherent, but frequently cite journals in other communities.Thus, ESS exhibits interdisciplinarity (journal communities cite each) and may be driven by research on a set of topical areas in a more granular sense, as journal communities are not neatly divisible into established social science disciplines.

Journal communities by academic disciplines
To gain more insight into whether journal communities fall neatly within disciplinary silos or exhibit more interdisciplinary tendencies, figure 5 depicts the distribution of journal communities by canonical social science and related fields (e.g., business, communication, and law).As ESS transcends disciplinary bounds, we would expect some dispersion of journal communities across disciplines.Research in the Sustainability community is largely conducted by Business and Economics, as economic behaviors, practices, and development are often framed in relation to striking a balance with ecosystems in ESS.In the Transportation community, most research is conducted by Geography and Economics, as building more environmentally amenable transportation systems typically deals with spatial data and concepts as well as questions of feasibility, accessibility, and/or profitability.Geography, Anthropology, Economics, and Sociology all publish research in the Ecology community, positioned as perhaps the most multidisciplinary community with a dispersed research agenda.Political Science and Law both occupy a significant amount of space in the Environmental Policy and Law community.The discipline of Geography dominates the Geography community, while some sociological research is also present.Psychology and Sociology dominate the research space of the Psychology and Communication community, consistent with each discipline's focus on social psychology and individual perceptions of reality.Finally, and unsurprisingly, the discipline of Economics occupies much of the research in the Environmental Economics journal community.In ESS, journal communities are largely multidisciplinary, as several disciplines publish in each community.

Journal communities by research topics
Last, figure 6 presents a heatmap of the distribution of topics across the journal-to-journal network, drawing attention to how journal communities correspond to thematic topics in ESS.The Sustainability community is heavily correlated with the 'pollution, economics, trade' topic: journals in this community tend to focus on questions of sustainable development, both within and between nations.In the Transportation community, 'urbanization, gis, urban planning' and 'fisheries, social-ecological systems, comanagement' are major topics, indicating the spatial nature of many issues relevant to transportation systems, the spanning of transportation systems across land, air, and water, and practical problems of management from political entities to resource users.The Ecology journal community is correlated strongly with the 'temperature, variability, climate' topic, consistent with inclinations toward the natural sciences, particularly archaeology, in geography and anthropology.While the correlation between the Environmental Policy & Law community with 'temperature, variability, and climate' may appear surprising, it likely reflects how international and national environmental politics and questions of governance surround issues relating to a changing climate, especially relating to resiliency of communities to variability of climate and environmental conditions.The journal community surrounding Geography is not particularly associated with any topic, although moderate correlations are exhibited with 'adaptation, vulnerability, adaptive capacity' and 'innovation, entrepreneurship, technology,' showing the importance of issues relating to environmental and climate adaptation and solutions but also that this journal community is not particularly organized around one or several prominent topics.Somewhat unsurprisingly, the community of Psychology & Communications is strongly correlated with the 'environmental concern, pro-environmental behavior, planned behavior' topic, highlighting how research in this space deals with how and why people become concerned (or not) about environmental issues, and how people are motivated to act upon those concerns/beliefs.Finally, the Environmental Economics community is strongly correlated with 'co2 emissions, energy efficiency, energy-consumption' and 'pollution, economics, trade,' illustrating that this journal space is interested in questions surrounding how to 'green' the economy through increased eco-efficiency, resolving free-rider problems, and other pro-environmental practices in the economic sphere.In this way, journal communities are not only multidisciplinary but also seek to address sets of research questions and themes that are relatively coherent within communities.

Discussion and conclusion
In this study, we conducted bibliometric and network analyses over the corpus of ESS from the Web of Science.Through a field-to-field network, where nodes are fields and ties are weighted by the number of co-occurrences in journals, we unveiled four distinct communities: environmental studies, environmental sciences, environmental health, and engineering.While sparsely connected in general, there is a moderate degree of connectivity between and within these communities, showing that these demarcations play an important role in the broader field.Over time, research in all four communities has grown, consistent with increased environmental concern and consciousness in public and policy spaces.We focus solely on the environmental studies community since it is largely composed of disciplines commonly associated with social science (e.g., anthropology; history; sociology; economics).Yet, what researchers study has changed over time, as early concerns regarding the economy and issues like pollution, environmental inequalities (political ecology), and environmental education have become more diffuse.Today, the contours of ESS are more dispersed: no single topic or set of topics dominates the space.However, it is important to note that topics relating to 'greening' the economy and corporate practices have become more prominent, indicating how scholars may want to produce actionable research in a context where energy corporations play a significant role in innovation and policymaking (Farrell 2016).By looking at associations between journal communities, disciplines, and topics, we illuminate the interdisciplinary character of ESS.Multiple disciplines publish in each journal community, showing the interdisciplinarity of the ESS journal space.Meanwhile, most of the journal communities are strongly correlated with one or more topics, showing that, while disciplines may use specialized language, they are still organizing their research around a set of research questions and thematic topics.
This research contributes to the literature in several ways.To our knowledge this is the first study to explore and seek to understand the contours of the ESS landscape as a whole, yielding an understanding of the research space in terms of how it is organized and changed through time by paying attention to multiple contexts of scientific inquiry, including journals, disciplines, topics, and relationships between them.While prior research has assessed the organization of environmental subfields in social science disciplines (Bohr and Dunlap 2018, Castro e Silva and Teixeira 2011, Qin et al 2020) and specific research areas (e.g., Yue et al 2020, Anuar et al 2022, Zheng et al 2022), we explore the broader ESS space to better understand which questions and topics dominate the research space.In this way, we also contribute to our understanding of how interdisciplinarity manifests in scientific output, not only in collaborative research teams but also in citational practices and unifying research themes and questions with specific attention to the relationship between citation and network structures.Finally, the diversification of research topics and a marked increase in actionable research draws attention to the role of global neoliberalization in ESS (cf Moore et al 2011), even as movement discourse and prominent scholarship highlights the systemic changes needed to avoid ecological crises (Steffen et al 2018, Why We Rebel n...).
While ESS clearly exhibits interdisciplinarity through its organization of journal communities and research topics within and across disciplines, that should not be conflated with a lack of coherency or dominance surrounding certain understandings or orientations toward the human-environment relationship.Despite coherent and distinctive research topics and journal communities, ESS researchers, by and large, conduct research that seeks to improve environmental performance in a variety of domains of social life.Specific journal communities or research topics, such as those relating to assessing environmental behavior and communication, education, or environmental inequities, may in part be engaged in descriptively ascertaining how people interface with or experience their ecological context, but the vast majority of research, journals, and topics engage in how we can make our social, political, economic, and transportation systems (among others) more environmentally friendly or more carefully consider environmental consequences.Put simply, ESS is generally concerned with improving current human-constructed systems toward ecological ends.As such, disciplines that may fundamentally challenge the status quo or ask more abstract, theoretical questions about the human-nature relationship, such as critical geography and sociology, are relatively marginal to the ESS space, while disciplines that more closely attend to changing particular governance and/or market mechanisms to produce better environmental outcomes, such as economics and political science, are more central.
At the same time, we also observed a marked increase in topics relating to greening the economy and entrenching sustainability into corporate practices.Moore et al (2011) discuss the permeation of neoliberalism as ideology into institutions of science and scientific practice, particularly as academics work in concert with industry and political experts to craft policy-relevant research.More generally, the desire of academics to influence policy exists in a neoliberal economic order that privileges market-based solutions to environmental problems may encourage examining topics relating to ecological efficiency, corporate responsibility, and innovation over, for example, systemic investigations of the economic structure as a whole.Thus, topics pertaining to market-based solutions-oriented, policy-relevant topics specifically become more prevalent through time, as the need for climate and environmental action becomes more pronounced, especially when taking a broad view of the ESS field.Paradoxically, as climate scientists and social movements call for systemic and large-scale changes, ESS becomes more concerned with actionable, and therefore incremental, environmental improvements.To be clear, we are not necessarily calling for the vast majority of solutionsoriented ESS to adopt more critical lenses, nor critical traditions within ESS to become more active in developing environmental solutions to social problems.Rather, we recommend ESS researchers in general to contemplate and reflect on their academic practices in this paradoxical context, and how it may or could relate to producing healthier environmental and climate pathways.
Future research should continue to explore dynamic aspects of ESS, specifically focusing on how subfields have changed over time.Research should also understand transdisciplinary approaches to understanding environmental problems within the social sciences with specific attention to the strengths and weaknesses of current approaches to better link ESS with applied researchers and those interested in data-driven solutions to the climate crisis.To be sure, actionable and policy-oriented research is necessary to inform policy-makers and corporations on how to promote pro-environmental change in the short-run.However, emphasis on these short-run changes may occlude needed investigations into how our political, economic, and technological systems can transform into more sustainable institutions in a changing climate.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Environmental social science field-to-field network, 1990-2022.Note: This graph visualizes the relationship between fields in the Environmental Social Sciences.Nodes are 229 fields assigned to journals in the WoS.Edges are the count of field overlaps across journals, with cross-community edge penalization.FastGreedy algorithm is used for community detection and the Fruchterman-Reingold algorithm is used for graph layout.Node labels are the top 5 most common fields in each community and node size is based on field frequency.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3. Environmental studies topic distribution over time, 1990-2022.Note: Topic labels are the top three terms loading on each topic.

Figure 4 .
Figure 4. Environmental studies journal-to-journal citation network.Note: This graph visualizes the relationship between environmental social science journals.Edges are the count of journal cocitation, with cross-community edge penalization.Louvain algorithm is used for community detection and the Fruchterman-Reingold algorithm is used for graph layout.Node labels are the top 5 most frequent journals in each community and node size is based on degree.

Figure 5 .
Figure 5. Environmental Studies Network Communities by Social Science Disciplines.Note: This graph visualizes the distribution of major social science Web of Science subject areas within the communities identified in the journal-to-journal network in the environmental studies subset of the environmental social science corpus.

Figure 6 .
Figure 6.Environmental Studies Journal Community by Topic Heat Map.Note: This heatmap visualizes the relationship between the communities identified in the journal co-citation network of environmental studies subset of the environmental social science corpus and the topics identified in the abstracts, article titles and keywords of the articles in the corpus.