Transition and transformation: A bibliometric analysis of two scientific networks researching socio-technical change

Sustainability policy in the early 2000s is based on and therefore influenced by scientific literature on ‘transition’. The importance of this link has inspired the authors to explore the structure of cooperating authors and citation networks in the field. In order to understand ‘transition’ literature, we compare it with an alternative term for change, ‘transformation’, which is also used in the context of socio-technical shifts towards sustainability. We expose the different structures of these fields with an overview of keywords, key references, key authors, and the coherence between references and authors.