Seeing the Forest for the Trees Sequel II: An Exploratory Bibliometric Analysis of the Chinese Environmental and Resource Sociology/Social Science Literature

Abstract Research on societal–environmental interactions has gained increasing currency in China during the past several decades. Unlike relevant fields of study in the United States, environmentally oriented sociological research in China has not evolved into two separate subdisciplines—environmental sociology (ES) and natural resource sociology (NRS). However, it is not clear how Chinese sociological/social science research communities associated with environmental and natural resource problems are linked with each other. We conducted an exploratory bibliometric analysis to examine scholarly networks in selected Chinese literature. The results reveal the coexistence of two distinct subfields representing the sociological and resource/environmental science traditions in environmental and natural resource social sciences. Closer collaborations across research lineages will not only contribute to the development of integrative environmental and resource sociology/social science in China, but furnish meaningful implications for the ES–NRS dialogue in the United States and global contexts as well.

Bibliometric networks; comparative analysis; environmental social science; environmental sociology; natural resource social science; natural resource sociology; visualization Natural resources and the environment are two focal areas of sociological research on the interactions between human and natural systems.The discussion on the relationships between environmental sociology (ES) and the sociology of natural resources (NRS) began during the late 1990s to early 2000s and was largely situated in the American academic context (Buttel 1996;Buttel and Field 2002).Scholars from both subdisciplines identified key ES-NRS distinctions in institutional origins, intellectual roots, subject matters (or definitions of the natural environment), academic or professional backgrounds of practitioners, theoretical orientations, scales of analysis, metropolitan/nonmetropolitan focuses, problem-solving emphases, and commitments in cross-disciplinary collaborations (Buttel 2002;Dunlap and Catton 2002;Field, Luloff, and Krannich 2002). 1 While these diverging trends generally seemed meaningful and informative, some researchers considered them unsubstantial or even counterproductive, and advocated for an integrative approach within and beyond the field of environmentally oriented sociological research (Belsky 2002;Freudenburg 2002;Rosa and Machlis 2002).Qin et al. (2018) reviewed literature samples of both subfields but found no systematic differences between them regarding theoretical, analytical, or practical characteristics.Nevertheless, a recent bibliometric analysis of a large journal article collection illustrated the coexistence of ES and NRS research networks based on coauthorship, citation, and bibliographic coupling (citation of common sources) relations (Qin et al. 2020).
Notwithstanding the scholastic debate on the similarities and distinctions between ES and NRS in the United States, reflections on their relationships have important implications for the training of young scholars and research infrastructure development in relevant fields of study.This is even more true for other countries in which research on societal-environmental interactions is fast growing and related disciplinary structures are still evolving.Although the ES-NRS dialogue has been expanded to international settings such as Latin America and China (Rudel 2002;Qin and Flint 2010), there is little research on such scholarly networks (or the lack thereof) in environmental and natural resource social sciences of other countries.We intend to address this literature gap in this review article through an exploratory bibliometric analysis of Chinese environmentally focused sociological and social science studies.This research should further advance the sociology of environmental and resource sociology or social science investigating the linkages between ES/NRS knowledge domains and socio-historical contexts.

The Institutional Origin of the ES-NRS Differentiation
The most straightforward distinction between ES and NRS is in their histories of development and institutional roots.Compared with other factors such as the different definitions or conceptions of environment and natural resources as well as the social pressures to distinguish between these two terms (Buttel and Field 2002;Dunlap and Catton 2002;Freudenburg 2002;Qin and Flint 2009), this distinction can better explain why the ES-NRS differentiation has largely remained an American phenomenon.Although the institutionalization of NRS was marked by the establishment of the Natural Resources Research Group of the Rural Sociological Society in 1964, the legacy of this subfield can be traced back to a long-standing thread of rural sociological research on the human-resource relationships (Firey 1978;Field and Burch 1988).Interestingly, ES has a relatively younger history than NRS as it grew out of the environmental movement during the early 1970s, while the Section on Environmental Sociology of the American Sociological Association was organized in 1974 (Buttel 2002).For the most part, the ES-NRS distinctions mirror the divergence between mainstream sociology and rural sociology in the United States.
Whereas ES has developed into a mature subdiscipline in many other countries, NRS barely expands its territory beyond American boundaries.In Europe, ES has gained a clear disciplinary identity since the late 1980s and has a more flexible organizational structure and closer relations with other social science disciplines (including rural sociology) than its American counterpart (Mol 2006).As for the developing world, Rudel (2002) argued that NRS was generally more applicable than ES in Latin American countries (e.g., Ecuador) with rich natural resources while ES was especially relevant for more urbanized and industrialized regions like southern Brazil.Nevertheless, in Brazil only ES was constructed with disciplinary self-consciousness and its scope was extended to encompass natural resource, food, and agricultural themes (Ferreira 2002).This is also the case in another region with vibrant development of ES-East Asia.In both Japan and South Korea, ES started as the sociology of environmental problems focusing on environmental pollutions, victims, and protests, while more recent research also covered natural resource issues such as commons resource management, organic farming, eco-tourism, forest conservation, and the social impact assessments of resource development or management projects (Iijima 1994;JAES 2019;Lee and Park 2002).ES-related professional organizations were founded in the early 1990s in both countries and have recruited a large number of members (particularly in Japan).
The growth of ES in China is characterized by a gradually increasing emphasis on environmental factors within conventional sociology, the focus on empirical studies, and the influences of western ES research (Hong and Xiao 2007).The relationships between population and the environment are naturally given a high priority in the social science agenda of this most populous country in the world.A key milestone of the disciplinary construction of Chinese ES is the establishment of the Specialized Committee on Population and Environmental Sociology of the Chinese Sociological Association in 1992.The group was eventually renamed the Specialized Committee on Environmental Sociology in 2009.During the past two decades, ES has become a fullfledged sociological subdiscipline in China with its own professional organization, journal, and conferences, whereas NRS still lacks clear recognition in Chinese academia.Other than several general review articles (Qin andFlint 2009, 2012;Qin et al. 2020;Zhen 2009), NRS-related terms (e.g., "ziran ziyuan shehuixue [sociology of natural resources]," "ziyuan shehuixue [resource sociology]," and "ziran ziyuan renwen lingyu [human dimensions of natural resources]") have been only occasionally invoked in the Chinese scientific literature (e.g., Chen 2022;Hong and Gong 2015).Nevertheless, there is a considerable amount of sociological or social science research on natural resource management and use in China.

Previous Reviews of the Chinese Environmental Sociological Research
The increasing accumulation of research products has nurtured a series of valuable reviews of the Chinese ES literature in recent years.Most of these reviews were in the traditional, narrative format and published in Chinese (e.g., Bao and Chen 2011;Chen and Cui 2013;Hong and Gong 2015), except for a few translated into or written in English (Hong and Xiao 2007;Qin and Flint 2012;Zinda, Li, and Liu 2018).Several studies also incorporated descriptive analyses of general publication trends in this area (e.g., Gu et al. 2011;Hong and Gong 2015).Overall, these previous reviews delineated a complete picture of the development trajectory of the Chinese ES subdiscipline and its major research themes, including environmental attitudes and behavior, environmental justice and protests, social causes and consequences of environmental problems, as well as grassland, water, and marine environmental studies.
In response to the English bibliometric study of environmental and resource sociology reported in Qin et al. (2020), Zhang and Liang (2020) reflected on its methodological implications and explored the potential applicability of bibliometrics to investigating environmental sociological research in China.In the Chinese social science literature, this informative review approach has been increasingly used in the analysis of specific research topics in environmental sociology, such as environmental behavior and environmental governance (e.g., Gao and Qin 2022;Wang 2019), as well as related areas of research like environmental history, environmental law, environmental economics, and natural resources (e.g., Guo et al. 2019;Liu and Liu 2021;Zheng 2020;Zheng and Chen 2020).All these studies focused on the identification of influential scholars, institutions, and publications as well as the visualization of coauthorship, citation, and keyword cooccurrence relations.However, there has been no attempt to examine scholarly traditions or networks within specific topical areas or build connections across research themes.Therefore, while there is no obvious ES-NRS division in China, it is not clear how Chinese research communities associated with environmental and natural resource problems are linked with each other.This review study can provide a more complete overview of environmentally oriented sociological and social science studies in China through an exploratory bibliometric analysis.

Methods
Bibliometrics generally refers to a quantitative review methodology that identifies key authors and publications as well as their relational patterns within scientific literature (De Bellis 2009).It provides a particularly effective and informative approach to analyzing the formation of scholarly networks in interdisciplinary fields.Bibliometric analyses can often involve thousands of articles, books, and other publications with the assistance of special software tools, and thus are substantially different from traditional literature reviews or systematic reviews (and meta-analyses) which aim to synthesize empirical evidence across individual studies. 2

Literature Search
This exploratory bibliometric study builds on previous work on the implications of the ES-NRS dialogue for the development of ES research in China (Qin and Flint 2010;Qin et al. 2019).The Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI) and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) databases are two electronic scientific sources most used for bibliometric analyses of Chinese literature.We chose CSSCI for our analysis because it contained more prestigious journal collections and included more complete bibliographic and citation information (particularly references) compared to CNKI.Its discipline-based data organization (25 disciplinary categories in total) can also well support our literature search and data analysis procedures.The stepwise article search procedure of this study was similar to the approach used in the bibliometric analysis of the English environmental and resource sociology literature (Qin et al. 2020).First, we conducted a keyword-based article search within the whole CSSCI database (see Table 1 for keyword combinations).Both "shehuixue (sociology)" and "shehui kexue (social science)" were included in the keyword strings as not many articles were retrieved in this stage.
Next, we used a detailed list of ES/NRS-related terms (see Applying another set of keywords particularly related to the social or human dimensions of natural resources, we then searched for additional articles from six journals in the Natural Resource and Environmental Science category of CSSCI: Zhongguo Renkou Ziyuan yu Huanjing (Chinese Population, Resources and Environment), Ziyuan Kexue Notes: These keyword combinations were developed on the basis of those used for an earlier bibliometric analysis of the English environmental and resource sociology literature (see Table 1 in Qin et al. [2020]).For some article searches involving the terms "huanjing (environment)," "ziyuan (resource)," "shengtai (ecology)," and "ziran (nature)," we also used the Boolean operator "NOT (─)" to exclude non-relevant strings such as "zhidu huanjing (institutional environment)," "renli ziyuan (human resource)," "jiaoyu shengtai (educational ecology)," and "ziran guilv (natural law)."Table S1 in the Supplemental Online Material provides a full list of the keywords used for the search in the Sociology category and selected general social science journals of CSSCI.Also see Table S2 for the original Chinese characters of these keywords.
(Resources Science), Ziran Ziyuan Xuebao (Journal of Natural Resources), Ganhanqu Ziyuan yu Huanjing (Journal of Arid Land Resources and Environment), Changjiang Liuyu Ziyuan yu Huanjing (Resources and Environment in the Yangtze Basin), and Zhongguo Tudi Kexue (China Land Science).All these three search phases covered the full time span of CSSCI records (1998-2021) and were completed in November 2021.
We then double-checked the titles (and abstracts if necessary) of the 6,097 retrieved articles (including duplicate records) and removed non-relevant records.Each of these articles was evaluated by both the lead author and one of the coauthors.The final dataset included 4,753 articles in total, with 4,656 (or 98.0%) of them selected from the 22 aforementioned journals.We also divided our data into two subsets based on the two journal categories (Sociology and Natural Resource-Environmental Science) involved in our literature search.Articles selected through the keyword-based search in the whole CSSCI database (Step 1 of the data collection process described above) were merged into the Sociology subdataset.

Data Analysis
The exported bibliographic data was analyzed with CiteSpace 6.1.R3 (https://citespace.podia.com/), a publicly available tool for analyzing and visualizing network patterns in both English and Chinese scientific literature.It can process data obtained from multiple sources including the Web of Science, Scopus, CSSCI, and CNKI.We first checked the number of articles/citations by journal and changes in the total number of articles over time, and examined major authors, author affiliations, and keywords by subdataset.
The bibliometric analysis focused on identifying scholar coauthorship networks, author co-citation networks, journal co-citation networks, and keyword co-occurrence networks in the whole dataset.In coauthorships and co-occurrence networks, subjects are connected with each other if they appear together in one or more publications.Co-citation relations are based on the frequencies with which entities (authors, journals, or documents) are cited together by others.Some of the functions of the software (VOSviewer) used for the previous English bibliometric analysis (Qin et al. 2020), such as author/ journal citation networks (based on direct citation relations) and bibliographic coupling networks (based on citations of common sources), are not available in CiteSpace.Given the nature of the raw data adopted in this analysis, most of the labels in the produced bibliometric network maps are in Chinese.
A core criterion for the ES-NRS differentiation is the academic or professional home of the two subdisciplines' cadres: ES ¼ liberal arts sociology and related departments; NRS ¼ agricultural social science and natural resource departments or natural resource agencies (Buttel 2002).After scholar coauthorship and co-citation network maps were generated in CiteSpace, we then grouped authors included in the analysis by disciplinary category (e.g., sociology and related social science disciplines; economics and management; and natural resource, environmental, and geographical sciences) to facilitate the interpretation of results.The locations of major author in these maps were solely determined by the bibliometric relations among them and not affected by the subsequent grouping.
Finally, to further examine the cross-linkages between different knowledge domains in CSSCI, we examined overlaps of the Sociology and Natural Resource-Environmental Science subdatasets in authors, author affiliations, top cited authors, top cited journals, and most occurred keywords using the Conditional Formatting function of Excel ("Highlight Cells Rules" !"Duplicate Values").The comparisons of authors, author affiliations, highly cited authors and journals, and most occurred keywords across journal categories are logically related to the bibliometric analyses of coauthorship, co-citation, and keyword co-occurrence networks.

Results
Descriptive analysis showed an increasing trend of Chinese sociological/social science studies of environmental and natural resource issues over the past two decades, particularly regarding articles selected from the six Natural Resource-Environmental Science journals (see Figure 1).The annual number of publications included in the Sociology (Social Science) subdataset also rose gradually over time.Table 2 provides a summary of the numbers of articles and citations for all sample journals.A large majority of articles in the full dataset were from those general social science and natural resource or environmental science journals.This is not surprising as the sociological CSSCI journals publish articles on a range of issues in addition to the environment and natural resources.
The lists of leading authors and author affiliations for the two literature subsets based on journal categories are presented in Table 3. Major authors in the Sociology subdataset were from sociology, demography, economics, and related departments or institutes of comprehensive universities, while those in the Natural Resource-Environmental Science subdataset were mostly located in natural resources/environment-focused research institutions or universities.Such a pattern of author affiliations is also reflected in the institutions with the highest numbers of articles within the two subdatasets (see Table 3).Top authors in the first group on average had fewer included articles than those in the second group.Additionally, as shown in Table 4, although the top keywords by subdataset demonstrate distinct differences in research focuses and analytical scales, there are several common core topics across journal categories including "kechixu fazhan (sustainable development)," "shengtai huanjing (ecological environment)," and "qihou bianhua (climate change)." Because of the dominance of Natural Resource-Environmental Science journal articles in the full literature dataset, major scholars included in the coauthorship network analysis were mainly in natural resources and related areas such as geography and environmental science (see Figure 2).The density of linkages among these authors was generally low as there were several disperse, connected groups consisting of scholars with similar disciplinary backgrounds: (1) sociology and related social science disciplines such as anthropology and demography; (2) economics and management; and (3) natural resource, environmental, and geographical sciences. 3These linkages largely represented  (2001-2007, 2010-2011, 2014-2021), Changjiang Liuyu Ziyuan yu Huanjing (2000Huanjing ( -2021)), and all other 14 selected journals .Also see Table S2 for these journal titles in Chinese.collaborations among colleagues in the same institutions or relationships between academic mentors and students.Further analysis of the collaboration networks of author affiliations showed similar trends of linkages within the three broad categories of disciplines, particularly economics/management and natural resource/environmental/geographical sciences.
Compared to the coauthorship networks, scholar co-citation networks indicated relatively stronger connections among authors included in the analysis.Figure 3 shows two different but overlapped author clusters corresponding respectively to (1) sociology, economics, and associated social science disciplines, and (2) natural resource, environmental, and geographical sciences.The results of the journal co-citation network analysis also revealed two groups of journals representing different disciplinary backgrounds (see Figure 4).The six Natural Resource-Environmental Science journals were situated near the center of the larger journal network in the lower half of the map, while some of the selected sociological CSSCI journals and related Chinese and English social science journals (particularly economic journals) formed a smaller but looser cluster at the top.Similarly, the mapping of author keyword co-occurrence relations indicated two subnetworks revolving around the themes of population-environment/resources-sustainability and land use/management, respectively (see lower and upper parts of Figure 5).Table 5 presents a summary of detailed comparisons of the Sociology and Natural Resource-Environmental Science subsamples.The duplications between the two subdatasets in terms of authorship and author citation sources were rather limited.The number of identical authors or top cited authors only accounted for a small proportion of the total numbers of authors or most cited authors for individual subdatasets.Although CiteSpace does not support the analysis of direct citation networks, a cross-check of top authors and cited authors in the two subsets of literature can shed light on the citation relations among major scholars in the whole dataset.Among the 107 top authors of the Sociology subdataset, 21 were also top cited authors under the same category, while only 5 showed up in the list of top cited authors for the other subdataset.Accordingly, 22 of the 137 top authors of the Natural Resource-Environmental Science sub-sample were also listed as top cited authors, but merely 3 of all these major authors were identified as top cited authors of the Sociology subdataset.This suggests that if we could visualize the authors' citation networks, most of the linkages between individual nodes would exist within two distinct clusters while the relations across them should be rather limited.
Nevertheless, the two subsets of literature were found to have significantly more overlaps in terms of top cited journal sources and most frequent keywords (see Table 5).The comparative analysis of major keywords showed 31 common research topics across these two journal camps (see Table 4 for several examples).The list of 128 top author keywords for the Sociology subdataset included many natural resourcerelated terms, such as "ziyuan huanjing (resources and the environment)," "shui ziyuan (water resource)," "tudi ziyuan (land resource)," and "ziyuan zuzhou (resource curse)."Further examination of the top cited journals for the Sociology journal category also

Discussion
This study extends a previous bibliometric analysis of the English ES-NRS literature (Qin et al. 2020) through an exploratory analysis of the Chinese environmental and resource sociological/social science work not commonly accessed by many international scholars.The results of these two related bibliometric studies should be comparable since the data collection and analytical procedures of this research were built on those for the earlier analysis.As Krannich (2020) and Zinda (2020) pointed out in their insightful commentaries on Qin et al. (2020), the formation of separate research lineages in social sciences is a typical intellectual phenomenon.Both the bibliometric network maps and the comparisons of disciplinary subdatasets in the Chinese literature analysis suggested the coexistence of two largely distinct subfields mirroring the ES-NRS relationships characterized in the original bibliometric analysis focusing on the United States settings.In China, as there is no historical or institutional source for the ES-NRS divide, sociological studies of natural resource issues are generally considered a major area of environmental sociological research (Qin and Flint 2010;Zhang and Liang 2020).Therefore, the distinctive trends identified in this study are somewhat more for broadly defined environmental and resource social sciences than for ES-NRS.Hong (1999) classified early environmental research in China as "sociological ES" and "environmental science ES."This review study provides bibliometric depictions of the sociological and resource/environmental science traditions in Chinese environmentally oriented social science research.To a large extent, the rather stringent disciplinary structures widely observed in Chinese universities and research institutes have contributed to this divergence.Increased awareness of the limited connections between these two subfields (no matter how they are labeled) can create more opportunities for collaborations and cross-pollinations.
Despite the clear distinctions in terms of coauthorship and citation relations, the results indicated significant overlaps between the Sociology and Natural Resource-Environmental Science subdatasets in research topics and journal reference sources.Previous studies have suggested a series of focal areas for integrative research on human-environmental interactions, such as the sociology of agriculture/fisheries, community-based environmental conservation, political ecology, climate change, and sustainability/sustainable development (Belsky 2002;Buttel 2002;Qin et al. 2020).This study points out several other promising directions along this line of inquiry.The overview of the development trajectories of ES in selected countries identified a common linkage with rural sociology.In fact, many key American environmental sociological scholars (e.g., Riley Dunlap, Frederick Buttle, and Williams Freudenburg) also engaged in rural and natural resource sociology at different stages of their careers.In developing countries and emerging economies (like China) where agriculture and rural settlements still hold essential roles, rural development (including livelihoods), conservation and resource management can serve as a key bridging area for environmental sociological and natural resource social science communities.
Additionally, the high frequencies of population-related terms ("renkou [population]" and "renkou wenti [population problem]") in the descriptive and network analyses of keywords marked the significance of population issues to general sociological research Even though the ES-NRS dialogue is not directly relevant to China's intellectual context, understanding the relationships between the two subdisciplines should help Chinese environmental and resource social scientists further advance their specialties and develop synergies across different research lineages.Qin and Flint (2012) proposed a transdisciplinary approach to the disciplinary construction of Chinese ES emphasizing multi-faceted conceptions of environment, middle-range theory development, cross-scale analyses, and problem-solving orientation.This strategy is readily applicable here as our bibliometric analysis encompassed a range of disciplines in addition to sociology, such as anthropology, demography, economics, philosophy, geography, ecology, natural resources, and environmental science. 4Initiating and sustaining integrative organizational platforms (e.g., symposiums/workshops, topic-based networks or journals, and funding programs) transcending rigid disciplinary structures in China can strengthen the communications and connections among scholars in environmental and natural resource social sciences.A transdisciplinary research perspective also necessitates the expansion of cooperations among academics from various disciplines to collaborations with nonacademic practitioners and stakeholders (Wickson, Carew, and Russell 2006).
The findings of this exploratory bibliometric study may also inform reflections on the ES-NRS differentiation (or lack thereof) in a broader scope.In the United States, the ES-NRS differentiation is becoming less salient over time as the primary source of NRS cadre (rural sociologists employed in agricultural and natural resource colleges/schools of land grant universities) shrinks.This research suggests that the fading ES-NRS debate does not necessarily mean more synergies or integration of divergent research paradigms and models.Prior bibliometric analyses of the English counterpart literature implied that the ES-NRS dialogue became increasingly pertinent to the similarities and differences between environmental sociology/social science and natural resource social science (Qin et al. 2020; Qin et al. 2023). 5In many other countries (particularly developing countries), although there is little disciplinary recognition of NRS, relevant work has wide utility and has been carried out by researchers and practitioners in sociology and related social or natural science disciplines such as geography, biology, and development studies (e.g., Ferreira 2002;JAES 2019;Rudel 2002).Therefore, it is likely to detect similar scholarly patterns of environmentally oriented sociological and social science literature in other languages as what was observed in this research.

Conclusions
Research on societal-environmental interactions has gained increasing currency in China during the past several decades.The discussion on environmental and resource sociology was initially introduced into Chinese academia over 10 years ago (Qin andFlint 2009, 2012).This study provides a first look at the sociological and resource/environmental science lineages in environmentally focused social science research in China.Considering the growing trend of relevant studies in China, we doubt that this study will be the last literature review or bibliometric analysis related to this topic.Despite our thorough literature search process, some main outlets for Chinese ES work might be excluded from the analysis because we relied on the CSSCI database.Future studies with increased literature accumulation and coverage should generate newer and more complete findings on scholarly networks within Chinese environmental and natural resource social sciences.
There has been no explicit ES-NRS divergence in environmentally oriented sociological work in China.Nevertheless, this exploratory bibliometric study depicts the coexistence of sociological and resource/environmental science traditions in Chinese environmental and resource social science research, which largely echoes the intellectual landscape reflected in relevant English literature.Thus far, there have been only limited associations between the two subfields in terms of coauthorship and citation relations, while their overlaps in research topical areas bode well for productive synergies and potential syntheses.Further advancement in this direction will not only contribute to the development of integrative environmental and resource sociology/social science in China, but furnish meaningful implications for the ES-NRS dialogue in the United States and global contexts as well.

Notes
1. See Qin et al. (2018Qin et al. ( , 2020) ) for detailed summaries of the differences between ES and NRS. 2. Interested readers can refer to Donthu et al. (2021) for an informative comparison of bibliometric analyses, meta-analyses, and traditional literature reviews (adopting a systematic approach).Despite the rapid increase of bibliometric analyses in the past decade, there is still a lack of standard guidance for analytical procedures and reporting practices that may be used to enhance the quality and reproducibility of bibliometric studies.We adopted typical procedures of conducting bibliometric analysis and mapping (Chen 2014;De Bellis 2009;van Eck and Waltman 2014) in both the earlier bibliometric analysis and this follow-up study.Although established reporting standards for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (e.g., RepOrting standards for Systematic Evidence Syntheses [ROSES; https://www.roses-reporting.com] in environmental research) are not directly applicable to bibliometrics, we built on relevant sections of the ROSES guidelines (i.e., literature searches, article screening, data synthesis and presentation, and search/screening results) in our descriptions of methods and results to improve the transparency of our methodological approaches.3. The network density (0.0139) was computed as the result of dividing the total number of actual linkages (104) among the 123 included authors by the maximum number of possible linkages among them (123 Â 122 Ä 2 ¼ 7,503).4. The research team of this review study also represents a range of academic backgrounds including sociology (environmental sociology), rural and natural resource sociology, agricultural and natural resource economics, population studies, geography, and environmental management. 5.A most recent update on the original bibliometric analysis of environmental and resource sociology also suggested increasing cross-linkages between ES and NRS (Qin et al. 2023).

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Number of articles by year.The information for 2021 is not included since most journal articles published in 2021 were not recorded in the CSSCI database yet at the time of literature search.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Scholar coauthorship networks (1998-2021).The figure includes 123 authors satisfying the "top 100 levels of most occurred items" criterion (six or more articles).For the ease of presentation, Chinese author names are not shown in the network map.Number labels represent the disciplinary backgrounds of authors: 1 ¼ sociology and related social science disciplines, 2 ¼ economics and management, and 3 ¼ natural resource, environmental, and geographical sciences.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3. Author co-citation networks (1998-2021).The figure includes 110 authors satisfying the "top 100 levels of most occurred items" criterion (25 or more citations).For the ease of presentation, Chinese author names are not shown in the network map.Number labels represent the disciplinary backgrounds of authors: 1 ¼ sociology, economics, and related social science disciplines, and 2 ¼ natural resource, environmental, and geographical sciences.

Figure 5 .
Figure 5. Author keyword co-occurrence networks (1998-2021).The figure includes 109 keywords satisfying the "top 100 levels of most occurred items" criterion (14 or more occurrences).Major key words are highlighted by original Chinese labels and their English translations.
as well as environmental and resource social sciences in China.Nearly half of the 11 Sociological journals and the leading Natural Resource-Environmental Science journal (Chinese Population, Resources and Environment) in the CSSCI database have this word in their titles.Moreover, the bibliometric network visualization suggested the potential of economics and management science for connecting the Sociology and Natural Resource-Environmental Science subsets of literature.Environmental and natural resource economics is far more established than environmental sociology in China's higher education and scientific research systems.Population, Resources and Environmental Economics has been recognized as an official subdiscipline of Economics by the Chinese Ministry of Education since 1997.Future research efforts and program development in the area of Population, Resources and Environmental Sociology can strengthen the linkages between sociological and resource/environmental science traditions in Chinese environmental and resource social science research.

Table 1
To gather more articles for the analysis, we also repeated this search process with another five CSSCI journals that frequently publish ES research: Xuexi yu Tansu (Study and Exploration), Yunnan Shehui Kexue (Social Sciences in Yunnan), Jiangsu Shehui Kexue (Jiangsu Social Sciences), Hohai Daxue Xuebao-Zhexue Shehui Kexueban (Journal of Hohai University-Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition), and Zhongyang Minzu Daxue Xuebao-Zhexue Shehui Kexueban (Journal of Minzu University of China-Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition).

Table 1 .
Keyword combinations for the article search.

Table 2 .
Numbers of articles and citations by journal.

Table 3 .
Major authors and author affiliations in the literature subdatasets.Related author affiliations are combined in this summary: Hohai University, School of Public Administration (including Hohai University, Department of Sociology); Renmin University of China, Department of Sociology (including Renmin University of China, Center for Sociological Theory and Methods); Minzu University of China, School of Economics (including Institute of Nationality Economics); Peking University, Department of Sociology (including Peking University, Institute of Sociology and Anthropology); Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Geographic Science and Natural Resources Research (including subsidiary research labs and centers); Huazhong Agricultural University, College of Public Administration (the same as Huazhong Agricultural University, College of Land Management); and Nanjing Agricultural University, College of Public Administration (the same as Nanjing Agricultural University, College of Land Management).

Table 4 .
Major keywords in the literature subdatasets.The phrase "huanjing shehuixue (environmental sociology)" is the second most frequent keyword in the Sociology subdataset.Also see TableS2in the Supplemental Online Material for the original Chinese characters of these keywords.

Table 5 .
Comparisons of the Sociology and Natural Resource─Environmental Science subdatasets.Top cited authors/journals and most frequent keywords were identified using the "top 100 levels of most cited or occurred items" selection criterion in CiteSpace.There were 107 and 137 top authors in the Sociology and Natural Resource─Environmental Science subdatasets, respectively.