Understanding the landscape of education for sustainable development in China: a bibliometric review and trend analysis of multicluster topics(1998–2023)

Abstract This study examined Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in China spanning over two decades(1998–2023). Assisted with text mining tool of Itginsight, by combining latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) modeling with social network analysis(SNA) and sentiment analysis, this study constructed a visualized analysis of the research status of ESD and explores the topics distribution and sentiment trends of Chinese scholars regarding ESD. The analysis shows that studies concerning ESD are displaying a “trending-declining” tendency with ample space for greater expansion. Existing researches have predominantly exhibited a predilection towards objectives, ideologies, methodologies, and themes concerning ESD. After further modeling, mapping multicluster topics, and conducting sentiment analysis on highly cited literature, it is found the focus of this discipline lies more on environmental education from different aspects, and an overriding sense of positivity concerning the inherent potential of ESD to drive transformative societal change is found. Despite the intricacies of various research themes, the scholarly consensus is that ESD represents a vital and indispensable means of addressing the pressing environmental and social challenges of our epoch, which should be optimized both theoretically and practically.