Natural capital accounting for sustainability: Bibliometric analysis and explainable artificial intelligence modeling for citation counts

Natural capital accounting plays a pivotal role in the sustainable management and conservation of natural resources. This paper aims to contribute to this field by conducting a bibliometric review of 1,400 articles and employing explainable artificial intelligence modeling (XAI) to identify and predict the factors that influence the impact of natural capital accounting (NCA) research, especially in terms of citations to this research. The findings revealed that the Journal of Cleaner Production is the leading publication in this field, with the highest h-index of 37. The XAI found that age of publication and number of references significantly impacted the likelihood of a paper receiving many citations. This study offers an innovative and practical framework for forecasting citation counts and provides effective strategies for authors and editors to enhance the citation impact of their work.