How green is Green IT? A multidisciplinary bibliometric study and research agenda

Scholarly interest in Green IT has been rapidly growing over the past 15 years in a wide variety of disciplines including computer science, information systems, sustainability, production management and engineering. This is not surprising given the growing environmental impacts of information and communication technologies. This article presents a bibliometric analysis of academic literature across 1862 sources to improve our understanding of the evolution and current state of this multidisciplinary field. The corpus includes 4067 published journal and conference papers identified using the Scopus database. A descriptive performance analysis of the corpus using Bibliometrix software first allows us to identify the most influential works, authors, sources, institutions, and countries in the field. Examination of its conceptual structure reveals that most work has focused on the design and use phases of ICTs and neglected the manufacturing and end-of-life phases. Further insights are provided and opportunities for future research are identified.