Despite its growing prominence, the adoption and implementation of circular economy practices remain hindered by a range of systemic, institutional, cognitive and behavioral barriers. While technical and economic challenges have received significant attention, the cognitive and psychological dimensions of these barriers are still underexplored. The paper aims to analyze the current trends and set the future research agenda for multidisciplinary research on the intersection of circular economy and cognitive and behavioral barriers.
Bibliographic data on cognitive and behavioral barriers in circular economy practices were extracted from the SCOPUS database and analyzed using VOSviewer software for visualization and Bibliometrix R for performance analysis.
This paper analyzes 814 multidisciplinary publications on cognitive and behavioral barriers in circular economy practices from 1983 to 2023. For this, the paper identifies key research themes, influential authors, journals and trends in literature. Also, the paper visualizes the mapping of the co-occurrence of keywords and author collaboration networks. Despite examining the intersection of circular economy and behavioral barriers, the co-occurrence analysis highlights a persistent gap in fully integrating these two fields, emphasizing the need for more interdisciplinary research.
The paper provides a holistic view of trends and future research directions for multidisciplinary research on the intersection of circular economy and cognitive and behavioral barriers, based on performance analysis and science mapping, offering a unique contribution to the literature.
