Definitions, business models, barriers and critiques: the circular economy papers cited most, the 2023 update to the 114 definitions study and search strings.
Most of the circular economy literature dates from 2016 onwards, and several of its most-cited papers are about what the term means. Kirchherr, Reike and Hekkert (2017) analysed 114 definitions and repeated the exercise with 221 in 2023. Geissdoerfer et al. (2017) compare the concept with sustainability, Ghisellini, Cialani and Ulgiati (2016) review the field, and Bocken et al. (2016) supply the business model vocabulary of slowing, closing and narrowing loops. Read the critics too: Korhonen, Honkasalo and Seppälä (2018) and Corvellec, Stowell and Johansson (2022).
How the literature is organised
Stahel (2016) gives a short account of the idea in Nature, and Bocken et al. (2016) say their vocabulary builds on his earlier work. As a research field it has grown mainly since 2016: OpenAlex counts between 100 and 300 titles a year from 2005 to 2015, more than 1,000 for 2018 and more than 6,000 for 2025.
The most-cited papers are attempts to pin the concept down. Ghisellini, Cialani and Ulgiati (2016) reviewed the literature. Geissdoerfer et al. (2017) asked whether it was a new sustainability paradigm. Kirchherr, Reike and Hekkert (2017) coded 114 definitions and found that most depict the concept as reduce, reuse and recycle activities and that social equity is barely mentioned.
A practical strand serves business. Bocken et al. (2016) link product design and business model strategies. Lieder and Rashid (2016) review implementation in manufacturing, Tukker (2015) reviews product-service systems as a route to resource efficiency, and Kirchherr et al. (2018) studied barriers in the European Union, where businesses and policy-makers ranked cultural barriers, not technological ones, as the most pressing.
Main debates
Beyond the definitional debate, the argument is about whether the circular economy delivers what its advocates claim. Corvellec, Stowell and Johansson (2022) conclude from the critiques they assemble that it is far from as promising as advocates say. Velenturf and Purnell (2021) start from the concern that some practices promoted as circular and sustainable have had detrimental effects on environment and society, and propose a value framework and ten principles for designing, implementing and evaluating a sustainable circular economy.
Where recent work is heading
Two directions dominate recent citations. One is digital: reviews link the circular economy with Industry 4.0 (Awan, Sroufe and Shahbaz, 2021), digitalisation (Chauhan, Parida and Dhir, 2022), big data analytics (Awan et al., 2021) and blockchain (Upadhyay et al., 2021). The other is material-specific: bioplastics, lithium-ion battery recycling (Neumann et al., 2022), agricultural biomass (Mujtaba et al., 2023), construction (Norouzi et al., 2021) and solid waste management (Sharma et al., 2021).
Most-cited foundational papers
Published before 2021 and ranked by how often later work cites them. Read the abstract of each and the full text of the three or four closest to your question. Citation count measures attention, not quality, so treat this as a map of what the field has argued about rather than a ranking of what is true.
Julian Kirchherr and 6 others (2018). Ecological Economics.
Cited by 1,872Open accessdoi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.04.028
Most-cited papers since 2021
Primary studies and conceptual papers from 2021 onwards. A paper published in 2024 has had a few years to accumulate citations where the works in the section above have had decades, so compare these counts with each other rather than with the ones above.
Masoud Norouzi and 4 others (2021). Journal of Building Engineering.
Cited by 477Open accessdoi:10.1016/j.jobe.2021.102704
Recent reviews and meta-analyses
The fastest way into a literature. A good review gives you the structure of the field, a reference list to mine and, in its limitations section, the gaps other researchers have already spotted.
Nathalia Suchek and 4 others (2021). Business Strategy and the Environment.
Cited by 575Open accessdoi:10.1002/bse.2834
How big the literature is, and where it is published
OpenAlex indexes 33,400 works whose title matches this topic. The chart shows how many were published each year from 2000 to 2025; the current year is left out because it is incomplete.
Show the numbers as a table
Year
Works
2000
2
2001
6
2002
6
2003
26
2004
38
2005
118
2006
235
2007
235
2008
205
2009
271
2010
279
2011
250
2012
135
2013
154
2014
148
2015
204
2016
447
2017
662
2018
1,091
2019
1,479
2020
2,115
2021
2,586
2022
2,792
2023
3,484
2024
4,464
2025
6,201
Journals behind the most-cited work
Counted across the 194 most-cited works on the topic, not across everything published. Browsing recent issues of the first two or three is a reliable way to find current work that has not yet been cited much.
Journal of Cleaner Production49 papers
Resources Conservation and Recycling25 papers
Journal of Industrial Ecology12 papers
Sustainability8 papers
Ecological Economics6 papers
Sustainable Production and Consumption6 papers
Technological Forecasting and Social Change6 papers
Bioresource Technology5 papers
Search strings to copy
Written for databases that accept Boolean operators (Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC, PubMed, EBSCO). Quotation marks keep a phrase together, an asterisk stands in for the end of a word, and OR groups go in brackets. British and American spellings are written out with OR rather than covered by a single-character wildcard, because those wildcards differ between databases: PubMed’s help page documents the asterisk only, and asks for at least four characters before it. Limit the search to title and abstract first; widen it only if you get too little. Our guide to starting a literature review covers how to record what you searched.
Implementation and barriers
"circular economy" AND (barrier* OR driver* OR enabler* OR adoption OR implementation) AND (firm* OR (SME OR SMEs) OR manufactur*)
Business models and design
("circular economy" OR "circular business model*") AND ("business model*" OR "product design" OR "product-service system*" OR remanufactur*)
A sector or material (replace it)
"circular economy" AND (plastic* OR construction OR textile* OR batter* OR "food waste" OR electronic*)
Explore the circular economy in Wonders →Opens Wonders on this question. Once you are signed in it becomes a project with suggested sub-topics and keywords you can edit before searching. The trial is 14 days.
Sub-topics to narrow into
A thesis-sized question usually sits inside one of these, combined with a population or a setting.
Definitions
Kirchherr, Reike and Hekkert (2017) and Kirchherr et al. (2023).
Business models and design
Bocken et al. (2016); Tukker (2015) on product-service systems.
Barriers
Kirchherr et al. (2018) found cultural barriers, not technological ones, to be the main obstacle in the EU.
Bioplastics (Rosenboom, Langer and Traverso, 2022) and the pollution the circular economy aims to prevent.
How to cite these papers
Every paper above has a DOI, a part of the reference that is easy to leave out. Here is one of them, “Conceptualizing the circular economy: An analysis of 114 definitions” (2017), in the two styles students ask about most:
APA 7th edition
Kirchherr, J., Reike, D., & Hekkert, M. (2017). Conceptualizing the circular economy: An analysis of 114 definitions. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 127, 221–232. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2017.09.005
MLA 9th edition
Kirchherr, Julian, et al. “Conceptualizing the Circular Economy: An Analysis of 114 Definitions.” Resources, Conservation and Recycling, vol. 127, 2017, pp. 221–32, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2017.09.005.
Check the details against the article itself before you submit: databases, including the one behind this page, sometimes carry the online-first year rather than the volume year. Full rules and more examples are in our guides to APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver and ABNT, with the rest in the citation guides. You can also format a reference from its DOI with our free citation tools.
Frequently asked questions
Which definition of the circular economy should I use?
Start from Kirchherr, Reike and Hekkert (2017), who coded 114 definitions on 17 dimensions. They found the circular economy most often depicted as a combination of reduce, reuse and recycle activities, with the systemic shift it requires often left out, economic prosperity named as the main aim, and social equity barely mentioned. Their 2023 update covers 221 definitions. Whichever definition you adopt, say where it comes from, because the papers show the concept means different things to different authors.
Is the circular economy the same as sustainability?
No. Geissdoerfer et al. (2017) wrote their review because the similarities and differences between the two concepts were ambiguous in the literature; they distinguish the terms and set out the types of relationship between them. Kirchherr, Reike and Hekkert (2017) found few explicit links to sustainable development in the definitions they coded. Murray, Skene and Haynes (2017) explore the concept in the Journal of Business Ethics.
What are the main criticisms?
Two listed papers are devoted to them. Korhonen, Honkasalo and Seppälä (2018) set out the concept and its limitations. Corvellec, Stowell and Johansson (2022) bring together critiques that the circular economy has diffuse limits and unclear theoretical grounds, faces structural obstacles to implementation, and depoliticises sustainable growth.
How this page was made
The lists come from OpenAlex, an open index of scholarly works whose data are published under a CC0 licence, queried on September 21, 2026 for works whose title matches "circular economy". Only works with a DOI are listed. Each one was checked against the publisher’s own record at Crossref or DataCite (title, year, first author, journal, volume and pages), and in three cases, where the publisher deposited no byline, against PubMed; anything OpenAlex or Crossref flags as retracted was left out, and an editor took out results that matched the words but not the subject. Citation counts are OpenAlex’s on that date and are usually lower than Google Scholar’s, which counts more kinds of document. Ranking by citations tells you what a field has relied on, not what is correct; several heavily cited papers on any topic are cited because later work disputes them. Books without a DOI are missing, which matters in fields where the founding text is a book.
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