Circular Economy has definitely gained a momentum among both, researchers and practitioners. The result is the production of multifarious knowledge, involving different disciplines such as economics, chemistry, design and Industrial Ecology. However, despite the steep growth of articles in Scopus, critics hold that blurriness in defining the Circular Economy is occurring and, due to its interdisciplinary but ambiguous nature, a systemic approach is required in order to set its boundaries. In this work, an innovative methodology is presented and discussed to identify which network of keywords exhaustively depicts the Circular Economy domain, in order to assess if the Circular Economy might be considered as a new paradigm or it represents a relabelling of already existent knowledge. The methodology consists in four steps: first, an initial seed list of keywords related to the Circular Economy is extracted from the Scopus database. Secondly, the network of the overall Wikipedia pages is discussed and, thirdly, two sub-networks, one representing the relevant fields and one the crucial technologies, are pointed out by classifying Wikipedia pages depending on the presence of a specific term in the first sentence. Finally, centrality indices are discussed and the most important clusters are highlighted, revealing the six main fields related to the Circular Economy: Sustainability, Material Flow Analysis, Waste Management, Water Management, Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) and Bioeconomy.

CIRCULAR ECONOMY: NEW PARADIGM OR JUST RELABELLING? A QUANTITATIVE TEXT AND SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS ON WIKIPEDIA WEBPAGES

Dario Cottafava;ASCIONE, GRAZIA SVEVA;
2019-01-01

Abstract

Circular Economy has definitely gained a momentum among both, researchers and practitioners. The result is the production of multifarious knowledge, involving different disciplines such as economics, chemistry, design and Industrial Ecology. However, despite the steep growth of articles in Scopus, critics hold that blurriness in defining the Circular Economy is occurring and, due to its interdisciplinary but ambiguous nature, a systemic approach is required in order to set its boundaries. In this work, an innovative methodology is presented and discussed to identify which network of keywords exhaustively depicts the Circular Economy domain, in order to assess if the Circular Economy might be considered as a new paradigm or it represents a relabelling of already existent knowledge. The methodology consists in four steps: first, an initial seed list of keywords related to the Circular Economy is extracted from the Scopus database. Secondly, the network of the overall Wikipedia pages is discussed and, thirdly, two sub-networks, one representing the relevant fields and one the crucial technologies, are pointed out by classifying Wikipedia pages depending on the presence of a specific term in the first sentence. Finally, centrality indices are discussed and the most important clusters are highlighted, revealing the six main fields related to the Circular Economy: Sustainability, Material Flow Analysis, Waste Management, Water Management, Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) and Bioeconomy.
2019
R&D Management Conference 2019
Paris
17-21/06/2019
R&D Management Conference 2019
1
14
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333532688_CIRCULAR_ECONOMY_NEW_PARADIGM_OR_JUST_RELABELLING_A_QUANTITATIVE_TEXT_AND_SOCIAL_NETWORK_ANALYSIS_ON_WIKIPEDIA_WEBPAGES_A_PREPRINT
Circular Economy; Social Network Analysis; Wikipedia
Dario Cottafava, Grazia Sveva Ascione, Ilaria Allori
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/2318/1711873
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