Foresight of environmental communication literatures: bibliometric versus ChatGPT

Purpose Environmental communication has been a profession and a subject of study for decades. Communication currently revolves around the anthropogenic ecological catastrophe, which makes the field’s early self-description as a crisis discipline even more pertinent. How communication is used and perceived significantly impacts how human-caused climate disasters and other environmental and social problems develop and how solutions are offered. The phenomenon of technology has shown significant impacts on how people refer to environmental communication. While bibliometric analysis (BA) helps understand the trends, ChatGPT can generate information related to environmental communication. How are they different from each other? What are the limitations? This study aims to identify the trends and limitations of BA and ChatGPT that are associated with environmental communication. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative approach is used, which refers to BA using the Biblioshiny software (n = 867) and content analysis on ChatGPT 3.5. It uses a systematic technique for keyword search, namely, environmental and communication, from 2000 to 2022. Findings There has been a decrease in the scientific production of studies starting in 2021 and 2022, which is believed to be due to the COVID-19 pandemic. ChatGPT provides valuable information but is rather complimentary to BA. ChatGPT is unable to provide statistical information related to environmental communication among Scopus-indexed publications. Research limitations/implications This study focuses on the literature published in Scopus from 2000 to 2022. The keyword is limited to “environmental” and “communication.” Besides, the choice of keywords made it specific to the studies involved in the BA, which may not include some other studies if the keywords are not listed. Originality/value The originality of the research focuses on the field of environmental communication, its evolution within previous literature and the comparison between BA and the use of ChatGPT for understanding trends and limitations within this field. The text touches upon various aspects, such as the historical context of environmental communication, the impact of technology, the trends in scientific production among Scopus journal papers and the limitations of using ChatGPT compared to BA.