Water-energy nexus: The origin, development and prospect

Abstract The water-energy nexus has gained great attention to both academe and practitioners in the past decade. In order to help expand the understanding in this field, we conduct a comprehensive literature review on water-energy nexus by using citation-based approach. A directional network is established in terms of citation relationships among 1185 related papers published in journals indexed by the Web of Science database from 2007 to 2019. Specifically, we first draw the citation chronological graph and main path analysis to show a complete picture of literature development trajectory since 2007. It is found that the current key route focuses on the understanding of coupling relations in macroscopic national systems, while the study of microscopic systems such as enterprises, families and individuals is lacked. In addition, considering that the citation-based approach may ignore the newest papers, 43 latest highly relevant papers are further analyzed in terms of study background, data source and modeling methods. To be specific, the main advantages and major limitations of existing approaches are identified. Finally, future research challenges and prospects are identified, including the shifts of research object: from macro systems to micro systems, the challenge of modeling: from analysis to analytics of big data, and the deepening of decision support: from knowing to doing.