Table of articles on economic-ecological decoupling 1990-2019

The table shows the results from a bibliometric survey conducted in two phases. Both surveys were done using a boolean search in Web of Science. The survey structure was: terms “decoupling”, “economic” and “environment” appear in the Title or Topic (Topic includes search within Title, Abstract, Author Keywords, and Keywords Plus®). The search was restricted to a period between years 1990–2019. The first survey was done on March 5th, 2019. The survey returned a total of 423 articles. As we were looking for empirical evidence, we left out of scope articles presenting scenarios, models and extrapolations, and articles presenting deeper analyses of previously presented empirical material. Out of the 423 articles 282 were out of scope, which left 141 articles to be reviewed. In order to complete the results for 2019, a second survey with the same parameters was conducted on January 2nd, 2020 and the search included the rest of 2019. It returned a total of 78 articles, out of which 35 were out of scope (3 articles from conference proceedings were not found and 3 articles were duplicates with first survey), which left 37 articles to be reviewed. In total 179 articles were reviewed.
The table presents these 179 articles as follows. In sheet ”search results”, each line presents one article:
column A – year of publication
column B – title of article
column C – publication
column D – DOI or other web-link
column E – author(s)
column F – geographical scope of article (International – National – Local)
column G – location studied in the article (if applicable)
column H – economic scope (Economy-wide – Several sectors – One sector)
column I – economic sector (if applicable)
column J – years studied in the article (if applicable)
column K – evidence of decoupling found (Yes – No)
column L – evidence of absolute decoupling found (Yes/No; if Yes, also brief description of between which indicators decoupling found)
In addition, sheet ”absolute” presents a list of articles with findings of absolute decoupling, sheet ”absolute impact” a list of articles with findings of absolute impact decoupling, and sheet ”absolute resource” a list of articles with findings of absolute resource decoupling. The sheet ”absolute resource” also further indicates articles limited to a sectoral study (column M) and to a geographical location (column N).