Circular economy (CE) has gained momentum in the political, economic and scientific fields. The growing popularity of the concept is accompanied by some definitional ambiguities and conceptual uncertainties. In particular, the relationship and contribution of CE to sustainable development (SD) and thus to a more sustainable society is currently under discussion. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this discussion by providing new insights into the evolution and state of CE research over the past two decades, in general, and its sustainability connotation, in particular. For doing so, a mixed-methods approach was adopted that combines a longitudinal bibliographic network analysis, multiple correspondence analysis and k-means clustering, correlated topic modeling, historiographic citation analysis and a semantic content analysis. The results indicate that the CE literature body can be divided into management and technically-oriented studies that have either a beginning-of-life or an end-of-life focus. Recycling is the most referred to R-strategy, followed by remanufacturing, repair and reuse, which, however, occur one order of magnitude less frequently. CE research and SD were found to exhibit a subset relationship, as only a limited number of environmental aspects is directly addressed. Social aspects form a periphery. The qualitative analysis further portraits the conceptual evolution of the CE-SD relationship between 2000 and 2019 by following the citation network of the 30 most influential CE papers. The results contribute to positioning CE research within the general Sustainable Development debate and to identifying potential, sustainability-related shortcomings and blind spots.

循环经济（CE）在政治，经济和科学领域得到了发展。该概念的日益普及伴随着一些定义上的歧义和概念上的不确定性。尤其是，目前正在讨论行政长官对可持续发展（SD）以及由此对更可持续的社会的关系和贡献。本文的目的是通过提供关于过去二十年来总体上CE研究的发展和状态的新见解，特别是其可持续性内涵，为这次讨论做出贡献。为此，采用了一种混合方法，该方法结合了纵向书目网络分析，多重对应分析和k均值聚类，相关主题建模，历史学引文分析和语义内容分析。结果表明，CE文献机构可以分为管理研究和面向技术的研究，这些研究要么关注生命的开始，要么关注生命的终结。回收是最常被提及的R策略，其次是再制造，维修和再利用，但是再生产的频率降低了一个数量级。由于直接解决了有限数量的环境问题，CE研究和SD被发现表现出子集关系。社会方面构成外围。定性分析通过遵循30篇最具影响力的CE论文的引文网络，进一步描绘了2000年至2019年CE-SD关系的概念演变。结果有助于将CE研究定位在一般的可持续发展辩论中，并有助于发现潜力，