A summary on research of household energy consumption: A bibliometric analysis

With the emergence of the contradictions between energy supply and demand, considerable attention has been paid to the residential household energy consumption with increasing research in this field. Based on databases of Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, this paper applies the bibliometric method to analyze the development and evolution of this research field using the literature published in the field of residential energy consumption during the period 1970-2018. The following findings were found: (1) The research on energy consumption of households is mainly divided into three stages: cognition (1970-1989), exploration (1990-2005), and rapid development (2006-2018); (2) By analyzing the citations of high-yield authors, institutions, journals and papers in this field, it is clear that the developed countries such as the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands have significantly stronger research capabilities in this field; (3) By analyzing the co-occurrence of keywords and co-citation of the literature in this field, the research hotspots in this field are summarized as the relationship between energy supply and demand, energy use efficiency, the relationship between various household indicators and energy consumption, environmental protection, modeling and measurement; (4) In view of the reality, future works should pay more attention to the influence of micro-factors, regional energy consumption issues, and energy consumption of rural households.