A bibliometric analysis of the impact of Industry 4.0 technologies on the Circular Economy

The concepts of circular economy (CE) and Industry 4.0 (I4.0) have grown in popularity among policymakers, researchers, academics, and manufacturers since 2013. CE represents a suitable strategy for achieving sus-tainability. I4.0 technologies, besides allowing manufacturing companies to in-crease their effectiveness and efficiency, can enable the adoption and imple-mentation of CE. Comprehensive bibliometric mapping and clustering ap-proaches would enable the visualization and organization of the most influ-ential research literature in the area. However, bibliometric review articles have not properly discussed the research hotspot, knowledge base and CE research evolution in the context of I4.0 technologies. So, this research aims to analyse the literature dealing with CE and I4.0 technologies, to provide a preliminary picture of the field. The research methodology consists of a bibliometric study from the Scopus database, analyzing a sample of 2632 articles published be-tween 2009 and June-2022 and then the final sample of 925 articles is used to conduct the cluster analysis. The study utilized PRISMA methodology with VOS Viewer and Biblioshiny for bibliometric analysis and visualization. The analysis revealed influential authors, journals, institutions, and trending articles within the CE and I4.0 technologies literature, and relationships between these streams. This may benefit academics and practitioners in understanding the main investigated areas and persisting gaps in CE and I4.0 research, giv-ing suggestions for future studies in these fields.