Discussing a challenging document focused on Land Use: The first
bibliometric analysis of Laudato Si’
Abstract
We live challenging times on several levels, and in this context the
second encyclical, Laudato Si’ (LS), of Pope Francis, published in 2015,
has provided a special challenge for academics. As Pope Francis
suggested in 2015, societies are challenged to modify the paradigms of
life to achieve more sustainable development. LS has quickly become a
widely quoted document, even by academics. This paper is the first
bibliometric research about LS aiming to analyze this encyclical and
explore several works published about LS between 2015 and 2020.To this
end, we studied all documents published in the Web of Science Core
Collection (238) and Scopus (222) about the topic “Laudato Si” in
depth and analyzed them using bibliometric methods. The results show
that there are scientific fields focused on studying LS in particular,
namely Religious Sciences and the fields of Sustainability and
Environment Studies. We also observed a small amount of networking among
the authors publishing about LS.