CiteSpace visualization software was used to quantitatively analyze the publication trends, hot topics, and research context evolution of SSCI(Social Sciences Citation Index) papers on energy transition in the WoS(Web of Science) database. The results indicate that from temporal perspective, relevant research has gone through stages of budding exploration, steady growth, and rapid development. Since 2016, there has been an explosive increase in the number of publications, demonstrating the integration of humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.From spatial distribution perspective, European countries are the main research force, while the academic influence of Asian countries in this field continues to increase. The top five research countries are the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, China, and the Netherlands.From high impact literature,technological innovation,fairness and justice are topics that have received more attention, while the factors affecting energy transition have been a hot topic in recent years. From the perspective of keywords, research hotspots have changed rapidly, shifting from government functions in energy transition to multi driven research of “technology-policy-public”,from single transition target research to collaborative research on energy transition and multiple objectives such as fairness and justice, economic growth, and social change. Therefore, in the future, attention should be paid to interdisciplinary and comprehensive research on energy transition, multi-objective collaborative research, key technology breakthrough research, and government market combination research, to enrich the grand narrative and theoretical system of energy transition in the Chinese context.

energy transition  /  international  /  research hotspots  /  CiteSpace  /  knowledge graph