Sustainable development is a global objective that aims to address the societal challenge of climate action, the environment, resource efficiency, and raw materials. In this sense, an important strategy is the promotion of green packaging, that is, the use of sustainable materials and designs for the packaging of goods. In recent years, many research works have been published in the specialised area covering the different perspectives and dimensions of green packaging. However, to our knowledge, no previous investigations have analysed the research activity on green packaging from business and consumer perspectives. The present study intends to fill this gap by analysing all of the publications found in the Scopus database with the help of visual analytic tools, including word clouds and Gephi network visualization software. More specifically, our study analyses the impact of green packaging from business and consumer viewpoints, including some specific issues such as the design and materials used in green packaging, green packaging costs, marketing strategies and corporate social responsibility related to green packaging, and the impact of green packaging in waste management, the circular economy, logistics, and supply chain management. The results obtained reveal the growing interest of scholars and researchers in all of these dimensions, as is made patently clear by the increasing number of journal publications in recent years. The practical implications of this study are significant, given the growing awareness among companies and consumers about the importance of the promotion of sustainable development through green packaging alternatives. More specifically, the results of this research could be very useful for all of those agents who are interested in learning about the main lines of research being developed in the field of green packaging.

In a broad sense, science can be understood as the knowledge contained in scientific manuscripts published in scientific journals. Scientific databases index only those journals that reach certain quality standards. Therefore, research and dissemination of scientific knowledge are essential activities for the growth of science itself. The aim of this manuscript is to assess the situation of medicine and environmental sciences among the bibliometric literature and to put it in perspective with the overall bibliometric publications in all scientific fields. The main countries publishing bibliometric manuscripts are China, USA and Spain. The latter country is ranked three out of the top five institutions according to the Scopus and WoS databases. In both databases, the average scientific collaboration of the top 20 institutions offers the same result, 41%. According to Scopus, the main subject categories in which this research falls are social sciences (38%), computer science (26%) and medicine (23%), while the environmental sciences category has 8%. In the analysis of the Medicine category alone, it has been observed that 136 countries have contributions in this field. The main countries are the United States, China and the United Kingdom. In the field of medicine, the main areas studied were: Epidemiology, Pediatrics, Orthopedics, Cardiology, Neurosurgery, Radiology, Ophthalmology, Oncology, Plastic Surgery and Psychiatry. With respect to environmental sciences, less international dissemination has been found, with only 83 countries having worked in this field. The main ones are China, Spain and the United States. Regarding the top 10 institutions, it can be stated that only Spain and China are relevant. Spain focuses on sustainability and China on the environment. The result of an independent keyword analysis of all published bibliometric manuscripts has shown that the main clusters are: Mapping Science (29%), Research Productivity (23%), Medicine (20%), Environmental Sciences (12%), Psychology (7%), Nursing (6%) and Engineering (4%). In short, medicine and environmental sciences are the most relevant areas in the field of bibliometrics after social sciences and computer sciences.