Mapping the Intellectual Structure of Green Cloud Computing: A Scientometrics Analysis of Scopus Publications (1990–2026)

Abstract

This study maps the intellectual landscape of green cloud computing by analysing publication trends, thematic evolution, author productivity, institutional contributions, and global collaboration from 1990 to 2026. It is driven by concerns over rising data-centre energy consumption and the need for sustainable digital infrastructure in academic and research libraries. A scientometrics analysis was conducted on 10,084 records from the Scopus database. Data were processed using R Studio with the Bibliometric package, while VOSviewer was applied for network mapping. Bradford’s law and Lotka’s law were used to assess source and author distributions. The field demonstrates strong growth (16.91% annually), with 19,318 authors across 3,473 sources. China, India, and the United States dominate output, while leading institutions include Islamic Azad University and major Chinese universities. Five key research clusters emerge, including energy-efficient resource allocation, edge/fog computing, sustainable data centres, virtualisation, and AI-driven energy management. Beyond description, the study makes three further contributions. It develops a conceptual framework in which the field is shown to have passed through three phases distinguished by their unit of optimisation, moving from the server (infrastructure efficiency), to the topology (distributed and edge architectures), to the control loop (AI-enabled sustainability control). It tests the robustness of its own findings against five alternative corpus specifications and reports that, while the thematic and structural results hold, the identity of the leading producer country reverses when an explicit sustainability term is required. And it measures, rather than asserts, the presence of library and information science in this literature: just 14 of 10,084 documents, or 0.14%, engage library, repository, or preservation settings. That measured absence, together with the contradiction between the field’s expanding output and its contracting engagement with carbon accounting, is translated into operational priorities for library managers, cloud-service adopters, systems administrators, policy makers, and LIS researchers.