Environmental Research & Technology, Vol. 2 (4), pp. 171-182, 2019 Corresponding Author: zervas@eap.gr (Efthimios Zervas) Received 26 June 2019; Received in revised form 7 October 2019; Accepted 20 October 2019 Available Online: 5 December 2019 Doi: https://doi.org/10.35208/ert.582337 © Yildiz Technical University, Environmental Engineering Department. All rights reserved. Environmental Research & Technology http://dergipark.gov.tr/ert RESEARCH ARTICLE Analysis of the world scientific production on public’s opinion on environmental issues Efi Drimili 1 , Zoe Gareiou 1 , Efthimios Zervas 1,* 1 Laboratory of Technology and Policy of Energy and Environment, School of Science and Technology, Hellenic Open University, 26335 Patra, GREECE ABSTRACT The aim of this study is to investigate the scientific production related to public attitude, behavior and acceptance of environmental issues through a bibliometric analysis. The databases Scopus was used to analyze the papers published in the subject area of environmental science. Bibliometric analysis was performed for authors, institutions, source type, document type, number of citations and countries in relation to publication year. An analysis of keywords of publications was also performed. The number of publications shows an overall exponential trend after 1965 until 2017. The most productive institution is the Wageningen University and Research Centre, followed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing Normal University. The keywords of the categories associated with "Ecology", "Sustainability,” and "Environmental Policy-Management" are the most commonly used in most studies. It seems that there is room for more intensive research on fields related to public's opinion on specific environmental issues. The findings of the research will contribute to a better understanding of the current state of the art, identifying key research areas in the field of public opinion on environmental issues and identifying future research trends and directions. Keywords: Public opinion, environmental issues, bibliometric analysis, research trends, Scopus, social acceptance 1. INTRODUCTION The global community is experiencing several environmental threats such as climate change, biodiversity loss [1], pollution and the overexploitation of natural resources. To address the world's environmental problems, it is essential that engineers and social scientists work together [2]. Engineers can provide the best, safest and most efficient solutions, whereas social scientists can facilitate better understanding of the reasons for public acceptance or resistance to a proposed environmental policy. Social scientists can also suggest ways in which public policy makers may be able to increase citizens’ acceptance and find solutions which are more acceptable for the community. The implementation of effective environmental policies depends on the broad public support [3]. So, the results of surveys exploring social acceptance on environmental issues are very important as they can help policy makers better understand and design policies to minimize resistance of the citizens. The findings are also key information for public policy makers as they convey the nature of the communication message that is likely to be effective and they provide guidance to public policy makers about interventions that are likely to increase public acceptance. One of the most widely used and accepted tools to measure the scientific research productivity in any particular field of research is bibliometric analysis. Bibliometrics, firstly introduced by Pritchard [4], is considered as a well-established research method for conducting systematic analyses [5]. Bibliometrics uses quantitative analysis and statistics to analyze the bibliometric characteristics of a given field, evaluate the performance of authors, academic institutions or countries, discover the hot topics, reveal the research tendency in future and help researchers to recognize novel schemes within research [6]-[8]. The field of environmental science shows a remarkable growing volume of scientific production. Bibliometric analysis has been used to study particular environmental fields, such as: water conservation and consumption [8]-[11], waste management and