TY - GEN
T1 - Studying the Evolution of the ‘Circular Economy’ Concept Using Topic Modelling
AU - Mahanty, Sampriti
AU - Boons, Frank
AU - Handl, Julia
AU - Batista-navarro, Riza
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors are grateful to Helen Holmes, Wouter Spekkink, Maria Sharmina, Malte Roedl, and Carly Fletcher for serving as the experts to evaluate the topic model results and providing their valuable feedback. Sampriti Mahanty acknowledges the support from Alliance Manchester Business School.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
PY - 2019/10/18
Y1 - 2019/10/18
N2 - Circular Economy has gained immense popularity for its perceived capacity to operationalise sustainable development. However, a comprehensive long-term understanding of the concept, characterising its evolution in academic literature, has not yet been provided. As a first step, we apply unsupervised topic models on academic articles to identify patterns in concept evolution. We generate topics using LDA, and investigate topic prevalence over time. We determine the optimal number of topics for the model (k) through coherence scorings and evaluate the topic model results by expert judgement. Specifying k as 20, we find topics in the literature focussing on resources, business models, process modelling, conceptual research and policies. We identify a shift in the research focus of contemporary literature, moving away from the Chinese predominance to a European perspective, along with a shift towards micro level interventions, e.g., circular design, business models, around 2014-2015.
AB - Circular Economy has gained immense popularity for its perceived capacity to operationalise sustainable development. However, a comprehensive long-term understanding of the concept, characterising its evolution in academic literature, has not yet been provided. As a first step, we apply unsupervised topic models on academic articles to identify patterns in concept evolution. We generate topics using LDA, and investigate topic prevalence over time. We determine the optimal number of topics for the model (k) through coherence scorings and evaluate the topic model results by expert judgement. Specifying k as 20, we find topics in the literature focussing on resources, business models, process modelling, conceptual research and policies. We identify a shift in the research focus of contemporary literature, moving away from the Chinese predominance to a European perspective, along with a shift towards micro level interventions, e.g., circular design, business models, around 2014-2015.
KW - CHINA
KW - Circular economy
KW - Concept evolution
KW - INDUSTRIAL SYMBIOSIS
KW - Topic modelling
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-33617-2_27
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-33617-2_27
M3 - Conference article in proceeding
SN - 978-3-030-33616-5
VL - 11872
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science
SP - 259
EP - 270
BT - INTELLIGENT DATA ENGINEERING AND AUTOMATED LEARNING (IDEAL 2019), PT II
A2 - Yin, H
A2 - Camacho, D
A2 - Tino, P
A2 - TallonBallesteros, AJ
A2 - Menezes, R
A2 - Allmendinger, R
PB - Springer, Cham
ER -