The relationship between water, energy, food, and the environment has piqued the interest of the global community due to the critical interdependence of these resources for long-term development. This article investigates research within the field of the quadruple nexus. Data from Scopus documents, with the keywords "water, energy, food, and environment" from 2011 to 2022, were processed and analyzed. Further research revealed that scientific exploration of the water-energy-food-environment relationship is rapidly expanding. The Scopus database was used to extract information about countries, institutions, highly cited publications, keywords, hot topics, and future research trends for this study. Additionally, the VOSviewer bibliometric software was employed to evaluate the scientific citations in this article. The results indicated that the USA, compared to other nations, publishes a larger quantity of articles in this field. Recently, China, India, and Middle Eastern countries have garnered significant attention and have been extensively researched. The Philippines, Finland, and Iran have also emerged among the top nations publishing recent articles on the water-energy-food-environment nexus (WEFEN). This article attempts to study the bibliography on the WEFEN connection, identify popular topics, and discern the fields of future studies in this discussion. Furthermore, it investigates the effects of economic and social factors as well as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on this quadruple nexus.
Keywords: Bibliometric analysis; COVID-19; Climate; Energy; Environment; Food; Network map; WEFEN; Water.
© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.