How do the research and public communities view biofuel development?

RENEWABLE & SUSTAINABLE ENERGY REVIEWS

卷:133

Article

Zhao, Qiankun^1,2  Cai, Ximing^1,2  Mischo, William³  Ma, Liyuan¹ 

[1] Univ Illinois, Dept Civil & Environm Engn, 205 N Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801 USA

[2] Univ Illinois, DOE Ctr Adv Bioenergy & Bioprod Innovat, 1206 Gregory Dr IGB, Urbana, IL 61801 USA

[3] Univ Illinois, Grainger Engn Lib Informat Ctr, 1301 W Springfield Ave, Urbana, IL 61801 USA

关键词: Biofuel;    Social view;    Scientific community;    Text mining;    Sentiment analysis;   

DOI  :  10.1016/j.rser.2020.110265

来源: Elsevier

【 摘 要 】

Understanding how public and research view biofuel development, especially the unsynchronized views, can explain the gaps between the actual biofuel production and consumption and the government mandates in the US. Applying a comparative text mining technique, these views are explored using 9924 news articles and 57,849 research abstracts. It is found both the public and research communities respond actively to major policy and incentive programs and market conditions and the public has been closely following important research advances. However, research and practice should be coordinated to achieve economies of scale for regular and alternative biofuels. Priority is particularly needed for policy research to support legislation and enforcement and remove technical barriers to commercialization; meanwhile, greater attention is needed to prompt the commercialization of mature technologies. In addition, sentiment analysis shows positive public perceptions in general and negative perceptions primarily stemming from fraud in biofuel tax-credit programs with minor concerns on unintended negative impacts of biofuel development and policy implementation issues. This study contributes to methodology by using cutting-edge text-mining techniques to the largest and most up-to-date datasets of public news articles and research publication abstracts so as to compare public and academic views on biofuel development. This study also contributes to knowledge discovery by providing new perspectives on biofuel development, which will support policy design and identify future research directions.

【 授权许可】

Free