Just sustainability transitions: a living review

Acknowledgements

The present text was originally written on a Wikiversity page, if you are reading it in another format, you can find this page here : https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Just_sustainability_transitions:_a_living_review. You are free to add your comments on the page discussion section.

Contributors

Name	Affiliation	ORCID	Contribution
Adélie Ranville	IAE de Grenoble, CERAG lab (https://ror.org/0509qp208)	https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3993-6135	Research design, database search, article screening, knowledge modelling, article writing
Amélie E. Pereira	Laboratoire DICEN IDF	https://orcid.org/0009-0005-5928-5586	Meta-data enrichement, article writing
Finn Nielsen	Technical University of Denmark	https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6128-3356	Data visualisation

Contribution statistics are visible here : https://xtools.wmcloud.org/pageinfo/en.wikiversity.org/Just_sustainability_transitions:_a_living_review

Introduction

Just sustainability transition refers to the process of shifting towards sustainable practices in a way that is equitable and inclusive. It includes dimensions of procedural, recognition, distributive and reparative justice and the concept is related to climate justice, environmental justice and energy justice. The study of sustainability transitions in social sciences requires dynamic and adaptive research synthesis methods. Sustainability transitions involve complex, multi-level processes influenced by technological, economic, social, and policy factors. Given the rapidly evolving nature of sustainability-related research, static literature reviews often become outdated, limiting their usefulness for policymakers, scholars, and practitioners. A living literature review – continuously updated with new findings – ensures that emerging insights, case studies, and theoretical developments are integrated cumulatively into the knowledge base. Developing such review will answer the call for more evidence-based practices in management sciences. Our project assesses the potential of Wikidata to build living review workflow on sustainability transition. We address three issues encountered by scientists: information overload, knowledge synthesis and results dissemination.

The problem of academic information overload

Global scientific output doubles every nine years, pushed by the “publish or perish” model incentivizing researchers to increase the quantity of research outputs. Researchers are subject to information overload as the number of publications to read is beyond what a human brain can handle, they are expected to produce high-quality research under an increasing time pressure. This intensification of academic work is being denounced as detrimental to the deep cognitive process needed to actually produce interesting knowledge. “Wikifying science” may in this context contribute to facilitating researcher’s work while preserving scientific quality. That is why in this project, we aim to build a searchable academic publication database with enriched meta-data that will allow scholars to navigate the existing publications corpus related to just sustainability transition more easily.

The problem of knowledge synthesis

The volume of academic production is rendering knowledge synthesis difficult. Scholars have thus called for making literature reviews cumulative and updatable and for shifting from static text format publications to dynamic knowledge mapping. This call is being answered through the development of living literature reviews that can be updated dynamically with new knowledge (examples : ,,). While such reviews method exist for quantitative research producing standardized results, they are not adapted to synthetize social science studies on sustainability transitions that involve diverse methodologies and various disciplinary perspectives. The goal of the project is to propose a demonstration of a living review method for social science findings on just sustainability transition, relying on the collaborative model and tools of Wikimedia projects notably Wikidata, Wikiversity and Wikipedia.

The problem of scientific results dissemination

There is urgent need to disseminate knowledge on impactful topics like sustainability transition while proprietary publication models, disinformation and censorship (e.g. US) is threatening access to free and reliable knowledge. In parallel, social scientists struggle to make their work impactful. Wikipedia is a key knowledge dissemination platform widely used by students and scientists themselves, as shown by the fact that articles used as sources on Wikipedia are more cited in the literature and that some scholars cite directly Wikipedia. However, scientists do not naturally contribute to wikimedia projects as part of their work because of lack of incentives,, but also other factors such as lack of time, lack of recognition and fit with scholarly workflow. In addition, expert participation is not immune to the gender gap. Because of gender segregation in disciplines, this may be detrimental to the content coverage on “female” topics, notably for social science in which women are more present. Our project proposes to improve expert contribution by making wikimedia projects (notably wikidata) useful tools that can facilitate research work, in addition to a key knowledge dissemination platform that is not country or institution-dependent. We propose to approach Wikimedia projects as a powerful (and free) knowledge management infrastructure that researchers could use. The Wikimedia ecosystem offers solutions that have strong potential to put open science principles into practices, including FAIR principles and linked open data.

Toward a living review on just sustainability transition

Just sustainability transition

Just sustainability transition transition is "a fair and equitable process of moving towards a post-carbon society". The concept of just transition originated from global trade unions in the 1980s to promote green jobs creation as a key element of sustainability transitions. However, scholars have broadened the use of this term to develop frameworks for analysing issues of fairness in these transitions. The concept of just transition can be used to bridge various bodies of scholarship : climate justice, environmental justiceand energy justice and take into account various aspects of justice including distributional justice, procedural justice, restorative justice, recognition justice.

Developping living reviews seem particularly relevant for the just transition literature: first, modeling knowledge and building graphs allows to take into account the complexity of sustainability transitions which involve multiple levels of analysis and fragmented results coming from various disciplines. Then, making literature reviews "living" would allow researchers to be less subject to information overload through a more systematic accumulation of knowledge. Finally, conducting this review with an open science philosophy aswers the challenge of knowledge dissemination, which is crucial in a context of socio-ecological emergency when decision-makers need to rapidely access reliable information on possible sustainability transition trajectories.

Living reviews

The concept of living systematic reviews is recent (2014), so the definition has been regularly reworked. Living systematic reviews complement the older concept of literature review. Its objective is the same : obtain an accurate overview of the state of scientific knowledge on a subject. A traditional review may be obsolete by the time it is published, as new studies have emerged between the submission of the manuscript and its publication. Living systematic reviews exists to address this common problem. It is therefore particularly useful in rapidly evolving fields of research, such as just transition. Literature review methods are currently evolving with new technological possibilities. Generative artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT are expected to have a strong influence on literature review activities. Advances in AI could render certain older methodological types of living systematic reviews obsoletes, as IA are useful to extract, filter and classify datas. Large language models (LLM) are "on the rise" (2025), but not yet integrated into tested and validated methodologies. Human validation stays notably necessary,. While AI can appear as a solution for scaling literature reviews, we are in the present project exploring another possible scenario which is to use more crowdsourcing in the literature review process.

Wikimedia projects

Wikipedia is a successfull example of large-scaled crowdsourcing of reliable knowledge synthesis. That is why this project proposes to explore the potential of the Wikimedia ecosystem for conducting living reviews. Since Wikipedia does aim to host original research, we are working on two sister projects : Wikidata and Wikiversity. Wikidata is a "collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation". "A knowledge graph is a structured representation of knowledge that captures information in a machine-readable format. A knowledge graph consists of a graph or network of interconnected data points, where each data point represents a piece of information or a concept, and the relationships between them are explicitly defined. Knowledge graphs organize and store data in a format that facilitates information retrieval, data analysis, and reasoning." Such graphs have a strong potential to conduct knowledge synthesis. They are especially usefull to build the ontologies (formal representations of concepts) that are necessary to organize and represent existing knowledge. In complement to using Wikidata to model knowledge, we decided to use Wikiversity to report and write our research results. Wikiversity is another Wikimedia project hosting pedagogical content, original research, and even a publishing house (WikiJournals). Like Wikipedia pages, Wikiversity pages are editable by everyone, have a discussion tab and a history log tab.

Our research question is : How can Wikimedia projects contribute to building a collaborative living review on just sustainability transition ?

In this project, we aim to test 4 hypothesis :

● Hypothesis 1: Wikidata can be used to enrich scientific item metadata and build living scientific corpora with rich annotations.

● Hypothesis 2: Wikidata can be used for scientific knowledge modeling through statements using scientific items as reference (e.g. conceptual typologies, cause-effect chains…).

● Hypothesis 3: SPARQL-based queries and visualizations can be used to navigate  scientific corpora and scientific knowledge graphs.

● Hypothesis 4: Wikimedia or Wikiversity pages can be used to write literature reviews collaboratively in text format augmented by interwiki links (following the ideal of linked open data).

We also have 2 assumptions :

● Assumption 1: Wikimedia projects have to be integrated into validated scientific protocols in order to be a valuable research tool.

● Assumption 2: Wikimedia project contribution has to be made interoperable with tools, methods and data types already used by researchers.

Methodology

Our study rely on a meta-review, that is a review of existing literature reviews. Data presented in literature reviews are usually presented as tables or diagrams, and sometimes provided as supplementary materials in publications. However, these data are not made interoperable and are not used to update prior literature reviews. Our goal was to synthesize results of previous literature reviews by making their findings compatible with linked open data and open science standards using Wikidata, Wikiversity, and other open-science infrastructures. The first step was to build and enrich the bibliographic metadata of a corpus of articles we selected into Wikidata. The second step was to model the content of these articles in Wikidata (e.g. typologies, causes-effects relationships...). The third step was to experiment relevant visualization of this content (e.g. causes-effects graphs). The las step was to write our report on a Wikiversity page, including links to our knowledge graph, following a linked open data philosophy.

1. Building an academic corpus and enriching bibliographic metadata

The goal of this step was to test Hypothesis 1 (Wikidata can be used to enrich scientific item metadata and build living scientific corpora with rich annotations). To do so we imported academic references into Wikidata, and explored the advantages of constituting a scholarly corpus on Wikidata in comparison (or in complementarity) to existing tools used by researchers such as reference management softwares and knowledge management softwares. Reference management software (Zenodo, Mendeley…) are used to collect scientific item metadata and integrate them into academic writing. They can also be used to analyze and annotate academic articles and can include export functions making the data interoperable with other analysis tools. Knowledge management software (Obsidian, Zettlr, Room Research, Notion, Logseq, Reflect…) are used by some researchers to organize their ideas. To build and enrich our academic corpus on Wikidata, we searched existing databases, selected the sample of articles we wanted to study, imported these articles metadata into Wikidata, enriched these metadata and finally reflected on the advantages and limitations of Wikidata to build a rich academic corpus.

Database search

Doing a systematic review on all aspects of just transition would have resulted in too many articles to review. We thus decided to first explore one aspect of justice : procedural justice. Procedural justice is about the fairness of decision-making processes related to transitions such as the inclusion of those impacted by these decisions (e.g. the participation of affected communities in decisions related to the construction of new infrastructures). Procedural justice can include issues of community and citizen participation in decision making, their political representation, their consultation, or the integration of their knowledge, with a focus on neglected population (indigenous people, women, gender and ethnic minorities). For our search, we selected keywords related to procedural justice (procedural justice OR procedural fairness OR democracy OR participation OR participatory) and keywords related to sustainability transition (sustainability OR energy OR climate) AND (transition OR transitions).

We conducted preliminary searches in various databases including Web of science, Go Triple, Dimensions and OpenAlex. Web of Science was the database offering the most relevant restults and included the possibility to filter results to display only litterature reviews. Articles metadata were exported (in .ris format) and then imported into the reference manager software Zotero.

Keywords search	Database	Search date	Filters	Number of results
(((TS=(procedural justice OR procedural fairness OR democracy OR participation OR participatory)) AND TS=(sustainability OR energy OR climate)) AND TS=(transition OR transitions)) AND TS=(review OR reviews)	Web of Science (all databases, all dates)	December 2025	Document type: Review Article	362

Article selection

Articles abstract were then screened and we selected only articles which were litterature reviews focusing on concepts related to procedural justice as their main topics. We excluded article which were :

• Not related to sustainability transition (e.g. sustainable shift in..., hard science papers...)
• Not literature reviews (e.g. review of policies/initiatives/cases, review notes, book review...)
• Not related to procedural justice but to participation into markets, participation in eco-friendly behaviors
• Including justice consideration only in “future research” suggestions
• Discussing participatory research methodologies (e.g. participatory modelling) without approaching it as an issue of justice, power or democracy
• Discussing procedural justice concepts as key variables or key results without it being the main focus of the paper

The files with the lists of included and excluded articles are available on the archive plateform Zenodo : https://zenodo.org/records/20749974

Importing selected articles into Wikidata

Before importing the selected articles meta-data into Wikidata, we first ran a script to check if any article was already present in Wikidata. Next, we used another script that checks the ISSN of the publication in Wikidata and add P-Q-pairs in the extra field of Zotero. Then we exported the articles data using the "export to Wikidata QuickStatements" function of Zotero and use the QuickStatements tool to add them to Wikidata.

Next we used the Cita (V1.0.0-beta.17) Zotero add-on to add articles QID in Zotero. At this point we identified that duplicates had been created in Wikidata (possibly because the initial script did not work that well because of the recent Graph Split on Wikidata). We merged duplicates on wikidata using the "Merge" gadget on Wikidata. We checked manually for duplicated statments in those items.

Article classification through metadata enrichement

Metadatas are data describing other data. The metadata of academic items usually include title, author, publication outlet, publication date, pages, DOI, URL... and can be structured following specific standards (e.g. Dublin Core). In academic databases such as WOS or OpenAlex, the only metadata available regarding the content of an academic article are the abstract and sometimes keywords. However, researchers conducting literature reviews need more precise informations. An important part of literature review work can thus be about describing what the articles are about. For example, describing industry focus, academic discipline, geography of research sites (countries), stakeholder focus (community, consumer, worker...), type of study (case study, theory development) or methodology (quantitative, qualitative, mixt) (e.g. ).

By metadata enrichment, we mean completing metadata to include additional information about the content of an academic piece. In Wikidata, each type of information is added using a specific property. A property is the edge that links two entities in the Wikidata knowledge graph. We selected three Wikidata properties to describe the content of our selected articles : main subject (P921) to describe what the article is about, study type (P8363) to describe its main methodology/research design and research site (P6153) to describe the geographical scope of the study. We also worked on adding author (P50).

Adding main subject (P921)

We first read the articles abstracts and listed relevant topics and their Wikidata ID in a shared spreadsheet. These topics were :

Qid	Main topic	Description
Q42377797	acceptability	characteristic of a thing being subject to acceptance for some purpose
Q2798912	accountability	concept of responsibility in ethics, governance and decision-making
Q421953	actor–network theory	theory within social science
Q84459973	affordability
Q185836	age of a person	time elapsed since a person was born
Q4764988	animal studies	field in which animals are studied in a variety of cross-disciplinary ways
Q4338318	awareness	state or ability to perceive, to feel, or to be conscious of events, objects, or sensory patterns
Q4930066	blue carbon	carbon captured by the world's coastal ocean ecosystems
Q430460	capability approach	economic theory
Q7569	child	human between birth and puberty
Q4116870	civic engagement	individual or group activity addressing issues of public concern
Q125928	climate change	human-caused changes to climate on Earth
Q260607	climate change adaptation	process of adjustment to actual or expected climate change and its effects, seeking to moderate or avoid harm or exploit beneficial opportunities
Q1291678	climate justice	term linking the climate crisis with environmental and social justice
Q2270945	co-creation	product or service design process in which input from consumers plays a central role
Q16972712	co-design	approach to design attempting to actively involve all stakeholders
Q16324410	coproduction	product or service design process in which input from consumers plays a central role
Q11024	communication	act of conveying intended meaning
Q177634	community	social unit of human organisms who share common values
Q5154673	community choice aggregation	alternative energy supply system
Q113514984	community energy	delivery of community-led renewable energy, energy demand reduction and energy supply projects
Q65807646	community participation	The taking part by members of a community in decisionmaking processes related to the development of their community
Q188843	cosmopolitanism	ideology that all human beings belong to a single community, based on a shared morality
Q11693783	decarbonization	change of economy, especially of energy industries, towards lower carbon dioxide emissions
Q284289	deliberative democracy	form of democracy focusing on consensus
Q7174	democracy	form of government
Q552284	distributive justice	concept of the socially just allocation of goods
Q1230584	diversity	concept in sociology and political studies
Q1049066	ecological economics	research field on the interdependence of human economies and natural ecosystems
Q8134	economics	social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services
Q868575	empowerment	providing increased autonomy
Q295865	ecosystem service	benefits created by nature, forests and environmental systems
Q138359220	energy citizenship	involvement of citizens in energy-related decisions
Q16869822	energy consumption	amount of energy or power used
Q1358789	senior	elderly person
Q14944319	energy democracy	concept in environmental justice movement
Q192704	energy efficiency	ratio between the useful energy output and the input of a machine
Q24965464	energy modeling	process of building computer models of energy systems in order to analyze them
Q1805337	energy policy	policy addressing energy issues
Q1341244	energy poverty	lack of access to modern energy services
Q3406659	energy production	conversion of energy from a primary source into a form useful to humans
Q117091181	energy justice	subconcept of economic equality
Q3456219	energy renovation	building works aimed at reducing energy consumption and decarbonising the energy sources used
Q2700433	energy security	national security considerations of energy availability
Q837718	energy storage	capture of energy produced at one time for use at a later time
Q795757	energy transition	long-term structural change towards sustainable energy systems
Q1479527	environmental justice	system of fairness
Q771773	fairness	concept in sociology and generally the interaction of society
Q56395513	farming system	method of agricultural production defined by its physical practices and economic characteristics
Q5465532	food system	all processes and infrastructure involved in feeding a population
Q4421	forest	dense collection of trees covering a relatively large area
Q48277	gender	social concept which distinguish the different gender categories
Q1553864	governance	all of the processes of governing, whether undertaken by a government, market or network, whether over a family, tribe, formal or informal organization or territory and whether through the laws, norms, power or language of an organized society
Q8458	human rights	inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled
Q11376059	human rights violation	act or omission which contravene the principles of human rights
Q103817	indigenous people	first inhabitants of an area and their descendants
Q113561794	indigenous science	indigenous knowledge applied to the scientific method
Q770480	injustice	quality relating to unfairness or undeserved outcomes
Q17142211	interactional justice	the perceived appropriateness of interpersonal treatment
Q1516555	intersectionnality	theoretical framework of multidimensional oppression
Q6316391	just transition	Framework developed by the trade union movement to encompass wide range of social interventions needed to secure decent work opportunities and a greener economy.
Q366139	legitimation	the process of making something acceptable and normative to a group
Q3027857	living lab	user-centered, open innovation ecosystem integrating research and innovation in real life communities
Q59679511	low income	home with little money
Q43619	natural environment	all living and non-living things occurring naturally on Earth or some region thereof
Q127514833	nature-positive	global goal to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030
Q13023682	non-human	organism not in the genus Homo
Q728646	partnership	arrangement in which parties agree to cooperate to advance their mutual interests
Q3907287	policy making	the act of developing policy
Q9357091	political theory	class of theory
Q265425	postcolonialism	academic discipline
Q25107	power	ability to influence the behavior of others
Q442100	procedural justice	fairness in the processes that resolve disputes and allocate resources
Q7249406	project governance	management framework
Q7257735	public engagement	Policy-making practice
Q541936	public participation	participation of citizens in various policy decisions and planning processes
Q6142016	recognition justice	social philosophy theory
Q10509953	renewable electricity	electricity from renweable sources
Q12705	renewable energy	energy collected from renewable resources
Q56510941	renewable energy policy
Q1165392	restorative justice	approach to justice where victims and perpetrators mediate a restitution agreement
Q4414036	rural population	inhabitants of rural areas or of small towns classified as rural
Q17152351	smart system	adaptive intelligent systems
Q187588	social class	group of people categorized in a hierarchy based on socioeconomic factors
Q264892	social justice	concept that discrimination recognized in society should be remedied
Q34749	social science	academic disciplines concerned with society and the relationships between individuals in society
Q2930198	stakeholder participation	involvement of groups or individuals affected by the actions of an entity
Q125359881	sustainability transition
Q219416	sustainability	ability of human civilization to coexist with the biosphere in a steady state
Q131201	sustainable development	mode of human development that meets current demands without compromising the needs of future generations
Q7649586	Sustainable Development Goals	set of United Nations-defined global development goals and climate change
Q69883	urban planning	technical and political process concerned with the use of land and design of the urban environment
Q920600	urban renewal	program of land redevelopment in cities, often where there is urban decay
Q3376054	vulnerable population	group of persons whose range of options is severely limited, are subjected to coercion, or who may be compromised in their ability to give informed consent
Q107389921	water-management
Q7981051	well-being	measure of how well life is to someone or a group with factors such as health, happiness and satisfaction
Q467	woman	female adult human
Q188867	future studies	study of possible, probable, and preferable social, technological and political futures
Q1038171	participatory design	active involvement of all stakeholders in the design process

Then, for each article, we inferred what the main subject (P921) was from the abstracts and author provided keywords.

Adding study type (P8363)

The sample of article we selected included only litterature reviews, but we wanted to describ what kind of literature review it was. We first read abstracts to identify all the different types of litterature reviews present in the corpus and created wikidata items which did not exist, for example integrative literature review (Q137209848) and conceptual review (Q137174203). We improved some of these method items using the methodological references cited in the reviewed papers. For example, we added a statement saying that scoping review (Q101116078) can have content analysis (Q653137) as data analysis method (P13391). After this step, the subclass of (P279) of literature review (Q2412849) in Wikidata were :

Qid	Study type	Description
Q603441	bibliometrics	statistical analysis of written publications, such as books or articles
Q472342	scientometrics	study of measuring and analysing science, technology and innovation
Q815382	meta-analysis	statistical method that summarizes data from multiple sources
Q1504425	systematic review	publication type, study that gathers, analyzes, and communicates the results of research and information on a topic
Q2412849	literature review	process of information search and text of a review article (Q7318358), which includes the current knowledge including substantive findings, as well as theoretical and methodological contributions to a particular topic
Q6822263	meta-regression	statistical tool used in meta-analyses
Q7301211	realist evaluation	theory-driven evaluation used in evaluating social programmes
Q17007303	combinatorial meta-analysis	study of the statistical properties of combinations of studies from a meta-analytic dataset
Q70470634	network meta-analysis	meta-analysis of randomized trials in which estimates of comparative treatment effects are visualized and interpreted from a network of interventions
Q101116078	scoping review	search for concepts by mapping the language and data which surrounds those concepts and adjusting the search method iteratively to synthesize evidence and assess the scope of an area of inquiry
Q110665014	narrative review	type of literature review, without structured method of retrieval and analysis
Q137174203	conceptual review	academic research aiming to review existing concepts and definitions in the litterature
Q137174450	critical review	type of literature review analysing strenghts, major contributions, mistakes and neglected issues in an academic field of research
Q137209848	integrative literature review	type of literature review
Q137211242	narrative review	type of literature review, without structured method of retrieval and analysis

For each article, we added the study type (P8363) based on the abstract and method sections. In case of doubt, we compared our interpretation.

Adding research site (P6153)

When an article had a specific geographical focus, we used the property research site (P6153) to describe it. For example, the article "A Review of Energy Communities in Sub-Saharan Africa as a Transition Pathway to Energy Democracy (Q137901202)" focused on sub-Saharan Africa (Q132959).

Adding author (P50)

When scholarly metadata are imported into Wikidata, the name of authors are stored as a chain of characters and linked to the property author name string (P2093). The property author (P50) allows to make a link with a Wikidata item representing the author. This avoids the problem of homonym authors by linking a unique identifyer to authors in Wikidata and linking this identifier to existing ones such as ORCID. We used the Author Disambiguator tool to create Wikidata items for researchers who did not yet have one. This tool helps to minimise errors caused by homonyms among researchers by categorizing scientific publications into thematic groups. It also automatically searches for ORCID, ResearchGate and VIAF pages.

Adding review of (P6977)

We explored the possibility to model review networks, that is linking review paper to reviewed papers (and not broadly cited papers). We selected one of the paper which had the most detailed list of reviewed papers (The role of energy democracy and energy citizenship for participatory energy transitions: A comprehensive review (Q114306483)), then we added this list in Wikidata using Open refine. Then we snowballed this process for the reviewed papers which were also litterature reviews.

Advantages and limitations of Wikidata to build a rich living academic corpus

To share the result of our work, we exported the dataset we build on Wikidata and shared it on the open archive Zenodo : https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20749973. The data is also available directly in Wikidata.

The goal of this step was to test Hypothesis 1 (Wikidata can be used to enrich scientific item metadata and build living scientific corpora with rich annotations). The sections below discuss the advantages and limitations of wikidata regarding this hypothesis.

Advantages of Wikidata

Key advantages of Wikidata are its flexible and collaborative nature as well as its interoperability. Wikidata ontology (that is how the data are structured) is collaboratively defined and properties can be added if relevant (after validation by the community). Compared to global databases like WOS or OpenAlex, Wikidata allows anyone to enter more metadata about each academic articles. Another notable advantage is that Wikidata items can be used as an interoperable controlled vocabulary. For example, when we stated that the main subject (P921) of the article The role of energy democracy and energy citizenship for participatory energy transitions: A comprehensive review (Q114306483) was energy transition (Q795757), "energy transition" was not just a word but a concept with its unique identifyer, linked to identifiers in other databases such as the Google Knowledge Graph ID or BNCF Thesaurus ID. Wikidata's collaborative nature is here adain an advantage. Contrary to institutional thesaurus, Wikidata allows anyone to add new concepts. This is particularly interesting as existing controlled vocabularies rarely reflect the degree of precision that researchers need in their work. The multilingual nature of Wikidata was also a strengh, some Wikidata contributors added labels for the concepts we used into different languages (For example, contributors added labels for energy democracy (Q14944319) in Armenian and Slovenian, languages we do not speak at all).

Limitations of Wikidata

The limitations of Wikidata is that it is not yet well integrated with the tools researchers use to do literature reviews (kowledge management softwares and bibliographic databases).

Compared to reference management softwares (Zenodo, Mendeley…) and knowledge management softwares (Obsidian, Zettlr, Room Research, Notion, Logseq, Reflect…), Wikidata is too general and does not allow to work on full texts. References and knowledge management softwares allow researcher to build their own specialised knowledge base, by taking notes and highlighting the content of the full texts. Wikidata is not connected to this process and there is a missing tool to facilitate the construction of graphs from the qualitative analysis of texts. In addition, when one is working on a specific corpus of item in Wikidata, it is also difficult to keep track of this corpus. We linked each academic item we were working on to our research project by adding a statement maintained by WikiProject (P6104) Developing a wiki-integrated workflow to build a living review on just sustainability transitions (Q134545539), but it was still relatively difficult to "filter" the part of the knowledge graph we were working on.

Compared to bilbiographic catalogues (OpenAlex, Web Of Science, GoTriple...), Wikidata will never be as exhaustive and do not offer user-friendly search functions. Since 2014, an important amount of bibliographic data was imported in Wikidata with the project Wikicite. At the time of its creation, Wikicite was adressing the issue of closed bibliographic data and was trying to make these data open, many academic items were imported automatically in Wikidata through scraping. This practice was abandoned because the large amont of bibliographic data congested queries on Wikidata (this led to the decision to split the Wikidata graph between academic and non academic entities), and because new open science initiatives, notably OpenAlex (2022), are now taking on the task of creating a exhaustive catalogues of all scholarly production. In this context, the community has to rethink the purpose of Wikidata regarding bilbiographic data.

Future possbilities

A solution to the limitations would be to developp the role of Wikidata as a link between other tools of the open science ecosystem. For example, developping and maintaining plugins or extensions for specialised softwares like Zotero, Wikibase, and Omeka could connect Wikidata with more specialised graphs. Such extensions could help building local graphs by allowing the reuse of wikidata item (eg. autocompletion), but also help contributing to Wikidata thanks to export features. (Example :) Wikidata could then be an intermediary between locally curated corpus and more exhaustive bilbiographic catalogues such as OpenAlex. For example, Wikidata items could be used to tag articles in a more precise way instead of using keywords and sharing enriched corpus in Wikidata could help to train more precise taging algorythms.

2.Modelling the content of litterature reviews

The goal of this step was to test Hypothesis 2 (Wikidata can be used for scientific knowledge modeling through statements using scientific items as reference) by modelling the content of our selected articles into Wikidata. Knowledge modelling is the process of making a machine readable model of knowledge. As we have a background in social sciences, we felt the need to question the relationship between this process and other methodologies such as concept mapping, thematic networks and causal networks. We present these methodologies before describing our current knowledge modelling experimentations.

Concept mapping, thematic networks and causal networks

This section presents social science methodology that presents similarities with knowledge modelling.

Concept maps

Example conceptual diagram

Concept maps are concepts (boxes) and propositions (arrow indicating the relationship between two boxes). Concept maps can be a powerful literature review tool allowing to synthetize theoretical statements about relationship between concepts. They can be built using specialised softwares (e.g. Cmap, Altas.Ti "network" feature...). The "box and arrow" logic is similar to how knowledge is modelled on Wikidata : the equivalent of concepts is item and the equivalent of propositions are statements. The difference between a softwares like Cmap and Wikidata is the underlying format of the data.

Thematic networks

Structure of a thematic network (Source: based on Attride-Stirling 2001)

A thematic network is “simply a way of organizing a thematic analysis of qualitative data”. It is compatible with classical coding strategies such as grounded theory. Thematic networks can be used to visualise the data structure after identifying themes and help structure and interpret the data. The principle is to assemble basic themes into more general themes. Qualitative researchers usually use Computer assisted qualitative data analysis software (Q4550939) and qualitative coding to identify themes and sub-themes. However, the nature of the relationship between these various themes and sub-themes is often not specified.

Causal loop diagram of Adoption model, used to demonstrate systems dynamics

Causal diagrams

The use of diagrams to represent causal relationship exist in various research practices. In statistics, researchers sometime present models with boxes and arrows representing correlations and/or causations. In qualitative research, building grounded theory models is about "[accounting] for not only all the major emergent concepts, themes, and dimensions, but also for their dynamic interrelationships. Speaking in classic boxes-and-arrows terms, this process amounts to assembling the constellation of boxes with a special focus on the arrows." After identifying themes, qualitative researchers are expected to theorize the "arrows" between themesR.esearchers relying on system theory also use causal loop diagram where boxes represent variables and arrows represent causal influence (positive or negative), causal relationship can "feedback" (two variables can influence each other).

Knowledge modelling in Wikidata

This section presents our knowledge modelling experimentation in Wikidata.

Conceptual modelling

Our first step was to reflect on what is a "concept" and what kind of wikidata properties could be used to model concepts in Wikidata. Scholars in management have called for more rigorous ways to define concepts and modelling concepts in Wikidata could help to build less ambiguous concepts. Concept definition encompass various aspects such as the nature of the phenomenon, its characteristics, the links with prototypical cases or examples, the contrast with other concepts, the links with causes and consequences..., and scholars have advised to take insight from philosophy to work on concepts. We thus read work in cognitive science which was summarizing psychology and philsosophy approaches on the determination of the content of concepts. We summarize these approaches below and examine which wikidata properties exist to represent them.

• Definition: the content of a concept can be formed by its decomposition into other concepts. Many Wikidata properties can be relevant to model definitions, for example: facet of (P1269), part of (P361)/has part(s) (P527), has part(s) of the class (P2670), has characteristic (P1552)/does not have characteristic (P6477), has goal (P3712)...
• Categorization: the content of a concept is formed by its illustration by an exemplar (a prototype) that best represent the concept. (The closer a phenomenon is to the prototype, the more likely it belong to the category). Apart from the inclusion of images to illustrate an item, Wikidata structure do not highlight exemplars. However, properties signifying relations of categorizations are among the most used with instance of (P31) and subclass of (P279) (see discussion here https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Basic_membership_properties).
• Theory: the content of a concept is formed by its role in providing explanation of the world. Wikidata includes several properties to describe causal relationships: has cause (P828)/has effect (P1542), contributing factor of (P1537)/has contributing factor (P1479), has immediate cause (P1478), does not have cause (P9353) (see discussions here : https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Modeling_causes/en).
• Essence: the content of a concept is "something" deep explaning the entity's existence and its properties. We can use concepts before knowing what they mean, and this is what allows us to revise our knowledge about it. The idea of essence is well represented by the QID of Wikidata entities: it is independent of language and definitions and we can use it before really knowing what its properties will be.
• Origin: the content of the concept is determined causally by social and historial factors (e.g. someone inventing the concept and introducing its use in a language community). This can be represented by the property named by (P3938).

Testing concept modelling on energy democracy (Q14944319)

To test concept modelling, we started by experimenting with the concept of energy democracy (Q14944319). We selected a subset of papers which had energy democracy as main topic :

• A Review of Energy Communities in Sub-Saharan Africa as a Transition Pathway to Energy Democracy (Q137901202)
• Of renewable energy, energy democracy, and sustainable development: A roadmap to accelerate the energy transition in developing countries (Q137901196)
• A critical review of energy democracy: A failure to deliver justice? (Q137901182)
• Energy democracy as a process, an outcome and a goal: A conceptual review (Q136447761)
• What is energy democracy? Connecting social science energy research and political theory (Q129652515)
• The role of energy democracy and energy citizenship for participatory energy transitions: A comprehensive review (Q114306483)

We read each paper and used them as source in manually entered statements in the item energy democracy (Q14944319). For example, Droubi et. Al stated "Energy democracy is both an ideal and a process", we thus entered the wikidata statement energy democracy (Q14944319) is an instance of (P31) ideal (Q840396) and process (Q3249551), using the paper as reference (see screenshot below). The result of this first step is visible in the archival version of the item (22 May 2026) here https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q14944319&oldid=2495982191.

We listed the difficulties encountered as we worked and we also asked the Wikidata community to give us feedback on our modelling on the item discussion page (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Talk:Q14944319). These issues were related to contradictions, precision, concision and ontology. We discuss each issue and draft recommandations to refine our modelling process.

Contradictions

Wikidata contributor's feedback highlighted some apparent contradictions (The values in "does not have effect" seems contrary to what is listed in "has goal".) We would however argue this is not a problem because "statements essentially point to referenceable sources of information and different sources may provide contradicting information, it's possible to represent a plurality of perspectives on Wikidata". Wikidata essentially supports epistemic pluralism : different worldviews can be represented in wikidata.Besides, in the case of goals versus effects statements, it is not contradictory because one can have a goal and fail to achieve it. In the case of energy democracy, the discrepancy between the stated goals of this movement and what it actually achieves is precisely what some authors are critiquing.

Recommandations : Contradictions are allowed in Wikidata.

Precision

We noted that conceptual modelling requires an important degree of formalization and precision. This is a key advantage of Wikidata to be able to create links toward precise concepts which have their own identifiers. For example, we were able to create statements about specific laws and their unique identifiers in legal databases (e.g. Renewable Energy Directive (Q139764294) and its identifier in the EUR-Lex database). However, the sources we are working with are not always precise enough and when concepts are not precisely defined, statements cannot be modelled correctly. For example, in the sentence "management of social affairs by voluntary and self-governing associations is deemed to ensure that both citizen choice and public welfare are best served", "choice" could refer to option (Q111986453), decision making (Q1331926), selection (Q12888920)... We can see here that academic texts are using natural language and thus are using ambiguous terms. As a result, we received feedbacks regarding a lack of precision in our statements (too many and too vague statements). In addition to the ambiguity of sources, a reason why we ended up with very general statements is because we avoided the creation of new Wikidata items. While following this implicit rule allowed us to focus on the most notable concepts, creating new items could also help make the statements more precise.

Recommandations : If a concept is ambiguous it should not be included in the modelled statements. Create more precise relevant concepts if they do not exist in Wikidata.

Subclass relationships between "concept" and "political concept".

Concision

Wikidata contributor's feedback indicated a lack of concision. Some of it coming from the fact that some values were "in the tree of another value". The rule we take from this feeback is a need of logical simplification. Two examples illustrate possible logical simplification :

• We stated that energy democracy (Q14944319) was an instance of (P31) political concept (Q33104069) and an instance of (P31) concept (Q151885). But in that case, it is not necessary to state that it is an instance of (P31) concept (Q151885), because political concept (Q33104069) is a subclass of (P279) social science concept (Q131362181), which is a subclass of (P279) concept (Q151885) (see diagram on the right). Here, we have to keep only the more precise item. This reasonning is based on the assumption that subclass of (P279) is transitive. It seems this reasonning could be generalized (we opened a discussion about this here https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Reasoning/Use_cases#Parcimonious_statement_constraints_based_on_subclass_of_(P279)_and_part_of_(P361)_transitivity) The Wikidata graph builder is usefull to visualize this kind of relationship (using "instance of" as transversal property and checking "instance of or subclass of").

• We stated that energy democracy (Q14944319) has part(s) of the class (P2670) energy cooperative (Q15991216) and community energy (Q113514984). But if we consider that energy cooperative (Q15991216) is a subclass of (P279) of community energy (Q113514984), then the inclusion of energy cooperative (Q15991216) is implied. Here we could keep only the broader item community energy (Q113514984). But unlike the reasonning above, we could not identify a way to generalize this reasonning. For example, community energy (Q113514984) can be a subclass of organization (Q43229), but using the former item is more informative than using the later. For the property has part(s) of the class (P2670), using a value that is too precise results in too many statements and using a value that is too general results in too trivial statements. Choosing the degree of precision is a problem similar to choosing whether or not to create a new item.

Recommandations : When possible, use logical simplification to make statements more parcimonious. The Wikidata graph builder is usefull to visualize redundancies.

Quantification

Modelling quantitative statements was challenging. We mostly skipped those but made an attempt for one case : the paper Of renewable energy, energy democracy, and sustainable development: A roadmap to accelerate the energy transition in developing countries (Q137901196) states that "9.8% of the final energy consumed in developing countries comes from modern renewable energy sources". Modelling this sentence by adding a statement in the item developing country (Q177323) would require creating a specific property for "final energy consumption". There are such properties in Wikidata : for example, for renewable energy subsidies, there is feed-in tariff (P6826). This type of property is notably useful to display information about an item (e.g. the population of a town) on Wikipedia through dynamic infoboxes that are updated with Wikidata information. But the current informal rule on Wikidata property creation is to prefer the use of general properties and avoid the creation of specific properties. Therefore creating properties for every quantifiable characteristic may not be possible. An alternative way to model quantity is to create a specific item to represent what is quantified and use other properties to represent quantities (see example below).

Despite this possibility, since quantitative data are usually stored elsewhere in more convenient formats, it may not be always relevant to include quantitative data into Wikidata. Instead, it might be more useful to link the item that is quantified to an external dataset about it. This can be done using the property external data available at URL (P1325).

Recommandation : Use existing properties for the quantity if it exists. If it does not exist, create an item representing what is measured, link it toward an external datasets and add quantitative statements if relevant.

Ontology

Ultimately, several of our difficulties were linked to some ontology challenges reflecting the complexity of the concept we were working on. According to the litterature, energy democracy (Q14944319) refer to multiple types of entities. It represents a concept, an ideal, a process and an outcome. We reflected this with multiple instance of (P31) statements, but encountered struggles to model differences between process versus outcomes, ideal versus reality, phenomenon versus theory and discourses versus practices. The wikidata community recommands having different items for process and outcome (criterion "process different from product (Q127270577)"). For example, painting (Q11629) (practice of applying paint) is different from painting (Q3305213) (visual artwork). However, this distinction is less straightforward for social processes which are are ongoing and evolving without a clear ending. Another problem was to separate ideal versus reality, we used has goal (P3712) to describe ideals and has part(s) of the class (P2670) to describe processes attempting to reach it. It was also difficult to separate phenomenon versus theory, for example, we did not manage to model the idea that the literature on energy democracy is fragmented. Finally, we also would have needed more distinctions between discourses and practices. Our sources suggested that energy democracy discourses and practices may have different causes, we used named by (P3938) to indicate the origins of the concept or the movments promoting it, but this was not a very precise way to model this idea.

Our first attempt to multiple "natures" of energy democracy into a single item is not satisfactory, and implementing the modelling recommandations we identified above may not be sufficient to build more parcimonious statements. Creating new items to reflect the different aspects of energy democracy may here be necessary. To do so we have to decide how to split the different natures energy democracy (Q14944319) and what will be the relationship between the resulting items. Here the definition of an ontology (Q324254) (formal representation) in Wikidata can quickly escalate into questionning ontology (Q44325) (metaphysical reflexion on the nature of things), and especially social ontology (Q1713511) (the nature of the social world). Indeed, the relations between the different types of entities constituting the social worls are not simple nor consensual among philosophers of social science.

For example, critical realism (Q15080858) posits that different things have different ways of being (modes of reality). They propose to classify entities in four categories : material entities (that can exist independently of humans), conceptual entities (concepts, discourses, ideas, meaning…), artefactual entities (human-made and combining conceptual and material elements) and social entities (that depends on human activity to exist). A complex concept like energy democracy (Q14944319) is concerned with all these types of entities. The energy system include many material entities such as oil fields, the sun, seas, trees... and artefacts such as energy production unit, power lines, home appliances, trucks... (Including conceptual entities such as the name of these artefacts or the knowledge to make them function.). There are the social entities in which they are encompassed (the enregy sectors, energy businesses, energy policies...). There are conceptual entities like normative/political discourses discussing how these artefact and social system should work and there are conceptual entities in the academic sphere building theories about how all this works or should work.

In theory, such ontology can be implemented in Wikidata as it "supports multiple coexisting classification" and allow multiple ontological frameworks to coexist. Current Wikidata ontology is structured with dischotomies such as abstract entity (Q7048977)/concrete object (Q4406616), natural object (Q1970309)/artificial object (Q16686448), collective entity (Q99527517)/individual entity (Q23958946), occurrent (Q67518978)/continuant (Q103940464), observable entity (Q30241068)/unobservable entity (Q3799040)... A quick search seem to show that entities related to the social reality can quickly fall into heterogeneous and sometime contradictory root classes (see table below).

Item	Existing root class entity
discourse (Q190539)	abstract entity (Q7048977) observable entity (Q30241068) occurrent (Q67518978)
language (Q34770)	abstract entity (Q7048977)
knowledge (Q9081)	abstract entity (Q7048977)
organization (Q43229)	collective entity (Q99527517)observable entity (Q30241068) continuant (Q103940464)
social movement (Q49773)	occurrent (Q67518978)/continuant (Q103940464) collective entity (Q99527517) observable entity (Q30241068) abstract entity (Q7048977)
renewable energy (Q12705)	concrete object (Q4406616)/abstract entity (Q7048977) natural object (Q1970309)/artificial object (Q16686448) collective entity (Q99527517)/individual item (Q132907471)

Future steps

Current upper ontology (Q3882785) in Wikidata do not seem very informative to classify the aspects of our concept in a top-down manner. Our next steps will thus be to :

• Export the existing model of the concept to keep track of each modelling steps (files and graphs screenshots)

• Explore if existing standards offer more relevant classes to categorize social entities (we opened the discussion about social ontology with the wikidata community here https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata_talk:WikiProject_Ontology#Social_ontology).
  • CRMSoc : https://cidoc-crm.org/crmsoc/fm_releases
  • Criteria for choosing an ontology = choose something that is used and maintained by a community (colleague feedback)
• Create new items to reflect the different facets of energy democracy (Q14944319) : the social movement advocating for it, the political concept theorizing it, the concrete initiatives implementing it, the litterature theorizing it, etc... based on a new reading of our sample of article and aligned with existing ontologies.
• Compare grounded theory/CAQDAS with knowledge modelling methods, test annotation softwares : https://inception-project.github.io/ ; https://pacte.crim.ca/index_en.html
• Read articles again and model more precise statements, including quotation of the original text in the reference field.
• Write a more precise research question to orient modelling : What are the main concepts of just transition, their definition and their relationships ?

3. Data visualisation

The goal of this step is to test Hypothesis 3 (SPARQL-based queries and visualizations can be used to navigate  scientific corpora and scientific knowledge graphs). At this stage we started to identify visualization use cases we would like to test, they are listed below.

Filter statements

• Visualize only statements using a specitic source in order to map the content of a single academic article. First test here: https://w.wiki/PFqH
• Visualize only items which are part of the present project (all the academic items of the project include the statement maintained by WikiProject (P6104) Developing a wiki-integrated workflow to build a living review on just sustainability transitions (Q134545539)).

Properties visualisation

• Visualise the "tree" of a property used in an item : Wikidata graph builder seem to be the most user friendly, robust and versatile tool to visualise a graph of a single property (https://angryloki.github.io)

Concepts visualisation

• Map all statements related to a single item (e.g. Scholia request "topic in context")
• Map the statements that two items have in common to make comparisons.

Mapping sources consensus

• Visualise graphs and use the number of references to determine edge thickness/weight in order to make consensual statements more visible.

4. Writing

The goal of this step is to test Hypothesis 4 (Wikiversity pages can be used to write literature reviews collaboratively in text format augmented by interwiki links).

Advantages of Wikiversity

Writing on a Wikiversity page offers some advantages to implement the principles of open linked data in text format. We could cite academic items using their Wikidata QID to generate the citations below (but if we use an URL to cite a paper, it does not automatically check if there is an existing QID for it), and also link toward Wikidata entities using a template (Wikidata entity link). Although we did not translate the present page for now, Wikiversity offers the possibility to translate a page in multiple languages (an interesting possibility in the context of the The FAIRisation of scholarly communication). The possibility to view the page history provide an exhaustive versionning of a paper, which constitute interesting data documenting the academic writing process (at first we did not comment the nature of our modifications but after thinking about this reuse possibility, we described it with more details). The contribution statistics based on the history also offers a new way to track author's contributions to a paper in a transparent way.

The issue of text interoperability

A key issue we are encountering is the question of the interoperability of texts. While the interoperability of data is starting to be well discussed in the open science community, the interoperability of texts do not seem to benefit from the same level of discussion. We encountered several interoperability issues regarding our writing. First, copying texts written on a word processor software (e.g. microsoft word) into a wiki page (or the other way around) is relatively seamless in terms of formatting, but the management of references is lacking. Reformatting references is very time consuming and a real barrier for text interoperability in academic context : it is difficult to copy text from an academic publication into a wiki text, and difficult to turn a wiki text into a publication (the only possibility is to export the page as a PDF and you may be reading this article in this format).

There are also uncertaineties regarding how to reuse texts published under creative common licences. Academic texts published under CC-BY-SA licences can in theory be remixed and reused. But academia does not have established practices regarding how this can be done. If we want to reuse a whole page, should we put it in quotation marks and simply cite the paper ? Should the original authors be listed as co-authors ? To what extent academic publisher will accept to publish "remixed" texts while they usually require that publications contain mainly unpublished content ? The norms of what is appropriate remix and reuse practices in academia has yet to be decided... and this could be an interesting conversation to have in the open science community.

Discussion

Our goal was to assess the potential of Wikidata and Wikiversity to build a living literature review method and tackle issues of information overload, knowledge synthesis and knowledge dissemination, following open science principles. By conducting a meta-review on just sustainability transition (that is a review of existing literature reviews), and experimenting with existing technical solutions, we were able to identify the strenghs and limitations of the Wikidata ecosystem. First Wikidata can be used to enrich scientific item metadata and build living scientific corpora with rich annotations (Hypothesis 1 is verified). However, the technical barriers to do so are still high and the Wikidata database is too general to allow a community to work on a specific curated corpus of scientific items. Secondly, Wikidata can be used for scientific knowledge modeling through statements using scientific items as reference (Hypothesis 2 is verified). However, this requires developping new methodological standards regarding what is a rigorous modelling in social science, as well as building specific ontology (Q324254). An unexpected finding is that the formalization necessary for knowledge modelling in wikidata invites to formalize the reasonning behind modelling choices, a process that is rarely done in qualitative analysis even though such reasonning are likely present. The modelling process also responds to calls in management sciences to engage in more systematic categorizing to avoid semantic confusion. Thirdly, SPARQL-based queries can be used to vizualised scientific corpora and scientific knowledge graphs, but we cannot completely say they allow users to "navigate" it (Hypothesis 3 is partially verified). SPARQL-based queries are powerful but they require technical knowledge, especially now that the split between academic and non-academic items in Wikidata requires to write federated queries. To be able to "navigate" scientific corpora and scientific knowledge graphs on Wikidata, more user-friendly tools would be needed. Finally, we did see advantaged in using Wikiversity pages to write collaboratively in text format augmented by hypertext links, but there are still important technical and instittional barriers (Hypothesis 3 is partially verified) : the interoperability of text is a key issue to reuse publications. The main issues we encountered were the management of references and uncertainty regarding the compatibilities between writing publicly on a wiki page and engaging in classical publication processes.

A potential solution to the issues encountered could be to develop a specialised literature review software that would allow researchers to build living literature reviews including knowledge graphs and wiki pages. This kind of tool should be user-friendly and include the missing tools we identified. In addition, it could include more advanced analysis functions such as logical reasonning based on the knowledge graph.

Future research

- Can we "reason" with Wikidata (See: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Reasoning) : neurosymbolic AI ?

Funding

This project is funded by the Wikimedia Research Fund, Grant ID: G-RS-2504-18935. The text of the initial research proposal is available here : https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20760603.

Data

QID	Year	DOI	Title
Q137901191	2025	10.1002/GEO2.70040	Place-Based Sustainability Transformations for Just Futures: A Systematic Review
Q137901187	2025	10.1002/WCC.932	Public Communication of Climate and Justice: A Scoping Review
Q135979013	2025	10.1007/S13280-025-02202-Z	Participatory approaches to climate adaptation, resilience, and mitigation: A systematic review
Q137901223	2022	10.1007/S13412-021-00726-W	A review of stakeholder participation studies in renewable electricity and water: does the resource context matter?
Q137901184	2021	10.1007/S40518-021-00184-6	Energy Storage as an Equity Asset.
Q114204627	2021	10.1007/S43621-021-00024-Z	Can public awareness, knowledge and engagement improve climate change adaptation policies?
Q137901209	2026	10.1016/J.AGSY.2025.104512	Designing with non-humans for agricultural systems transformation: An interdisciplinary review and framework for reflection
Q137901201	2025	10.1016/J.COPSYC.2024.101987	Individual and community catalysts for Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) development
Q114197507	2022	10.1016/J.CRM.2022.100438	Advancements of sustainable development goals in co-production for climate change adaptation research
Q129203992	2024	10.1016/J.EGYR.2024.01.040	Empowering energy citizenship: Exploring dimensions and drivers in citizen engagement during the energy transition
Q137901216	2026	10.1016/J.EIAR.2025.108187	From participation to partnership: A systematic review of public engagement in sustainable urban planning
Q137210566	2016	10.1016/J.ERSS.2015.10.004	Energy justice: A conceptual review
Q115448818	2016	10.1016/J.ERSS.2016.04.001	Stakeholder involvement in sustainability science—A critical view
Q129652515	2018	10.1016/J.ERSS.2018.06.010	What is energy democracy? Connecting social science energy research and political theory
Q137901196	2020	10.1016/J.ERSS.2020.101716	Of renewable energy, energy democracy, and sustainable development: A roadmap to accelerate the energy transition in developing countries
Q136447761	2020	10.1016/J.ERSS.2020.101768	Energy democracy as a process, an outcome and a goal: A conceptual review
Q137901204	2021	10.1016/J.ERSS.2020.101834	Identities, innovation, and governance: A systematic review of co-creation in wind energy transitions
Q137901183	2021	10.1016/J.ERSS.2020.101837	Renewable energy for whom? A global systematic review of the environmental justice implications of renewable energy technologies
Q137901207	2021	10.1016/J.ERSS.2020.101871	Rethinking community empowerment in the energy transformation: A critical review of the definitions, drivers and outcomes
Q137901215	2021	10.1016/J.ERSS.2020.101876	Co-production in the wind energy sector: A systematic literature review of public engagement beyond invited stakeholder participation
Q114306511	2021	10.1016/J.ERSS.2020.101907	From consultation toward co-production in science and policy: A critical systematic review of participatory climate and energy initiatives
Q137901221	2021	10.1016/J.ERSS.2021.102257	The challenges of engaging island communities: Lessons on renewable energy from a review of 17 case studies
Q137901218	2022	10.1016/J.ERSS.2021.102333	The (in)justices of smart local energy systems: A systematic review, integrated framework, and future research agenda
Q137901182	2022	10.1016/J.ERSS.2021.102444	A critical review of energy democracy: A failure to deliver justice?
Q114306483	2022	10.1016/J.ERSS.2021.102482	The role of energy democracy and energy citizenship for participatory energy transitions: A comprehensive review
Q114306476	2022	10.1016/J.ERSS.2022.102714	What about citizens? A literature review of citizen engagement in sustainability transitions research
Q137901193	2022	10.1016/J.ERSS.2022.102862	When energy justice is contested: A systematic review of a decade of research on Sweden?s conflicted energy landscape
Q137901219	2023	10.1016/J.ERSS.2022.102913	Can we optimise for justice? Reviewing the inclusion of energy justice in energy system optimisation models
Q137901186	2023	10.1016/J.ERSS.2023.103010	Analysing intersections of justice with energy transitions in India- A systematic literature review
Q137901181	2023	10.1016/J.ERSS.2023.103053	Fostering justice through engagement: A literature review of public engagement in energy transitions
Q137211155	2023	10.1016/J.ERSS.2023.103213	A fairway to fairness: Toward a richer conceptualization of fairness perceptions for just energy transitions
Q137901217	2023	10.1016/J.ERSS.2023.103221	Powering just energy transitions: A review of the justice implications of community choice aggregation
Q137901199	2025	10.1016/J.ERSS.2025.104016	Making energy renovations equitable: A literature review of decision-making criteria for a just energy transition in residential buildings
Q137901188	2025	10.1016/J.ERSS.2025.104036	Community energy justice: A review of origins, convergence, and a research agenda
Q137901211	2025	10.1016/J.ERSS.2025.104067	Psychological and social factors driving citizen involvement in renewable energy communities: A systematic review
Q137901192	2025	10.1016/J.ERSS.2025.104149	Assessing social impacts and Energy Justice along green hydrogen supply chains: a capability-based framework
Q137901195	2025	10.1016/J.ERSS.2025.104422	Out of place, scale and time? Navigating injustices across mission arenas of the German Energiewende
Q137901185	2024	10.1016/J.ESD.2024.101546	Characterizing 'injustices' in clean energy transitions in Africa
Q137901226	2024	10.1016/J.JCLEPRO.2024.143470	Energy justice and sustainable urban renewal: A systematic review of low-income old town communities
Q137901222	2024	10.1016/J.JENVMAN.2024.120804	Forest, climate, and policy literature lacks acknowledgement of environmental justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion
Q115441381	2021	10.1016/J.RSER.2021.111504	Participatory methods in energy system modelling and planning – A review
Q137901205	2025	10.1016/J.RSER.2025.115892	A systematic review of the intersection between energy justice and human rights
Q137901225	2024	10.1017/SUS.2024.24	Blue carbon as just transition? A structured literature review
Q137901220	2025	10.1017/SUS.2025.2	Toward an intersectional equity approach in social-ecological transformations
Q137901203	2024	10.1080/14693062.2023.2256697	Exploring the democracy-climate nexus: a review of correlations between democracy and climate policy performance
Q137901164	2022	10.1111/GEC3.12662	Creating fairer futures for sustainability transitions
Q137901227	2025	10.1139/ER-2024-0018	Community engagement in nature-positive food systems programming and research in East and Southern Africa: a review
Q119955266	2019	10.1146/ANNUREV-ENVIRON-101718-033103	Co-Producing Sustainability: Reordering the Governance of Science, Policy, and Practice
Q137901206	2023	10.1146/ANNUREV-ENVIRON-112621-063400	Metrics for Decision-Making in Energy Justice
Q137901213	2022	10.1186/S13705-021-00330-4	Mapping emergent public engagement in societal transitions: a scoping review
Q137901163	2025	10.17573/CEPAR.2025.2.09	From Co-Creation to Circular Cities: Exploring Living Labs in EU Governance Frameworks - A Literature Review
Q137901197	2024	10.3390/EN17143512	A Systematic Review on the Path to Inclusive and Sustainable Energy Transitions
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