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Analysis of Hotspots and Research Trends of Textile Mills Based on Bibliometric Study
Summary
This review study analyzed decades of research on textile mills (the factories that produce fabric) to see how scientific attention has shifted over time. It found that early research focused on worker health risks like cotton-dust exposure, while newer studies are turning toward pollution problems like microplastic emissions, as well as making mills more sustainable and efficient. The takeaway: as textile production scales up globally, researchers still need to pay closer attention to protecting factory workers' health and controlling microplastic pollution, areas the authors say deserve more focus going forward.
Textile mills are a critical component of the textile processing sector, and their development directly affects production efficiency, resource consumption, occupational health, and sustainable industrial upgrading. Although textile materials, processes, and textile products have attracted extensive scholarly attention, systematic reviews focusing specifically on textile mills as integrated production, environmental, architectural, and management systems remain limited. To address this gap, this study uses CiteSpace and Excel to conduct a bibliometric analysis of Chinese and international textile-mill literature indexed in CNKI and the Web of Science Core Collection from 1996 to 2025. The objective is to identify publication trends, collaboration patterns, research hotspots, thematic evolution, and future directions, and to clarify how textile-mill research can support green, intelligent, and circular transformation of the textile sector. The results show that the overall research volume remains modest; CNKI publications display a fluctuating downward trend, whereas WOS publications have grown rapidly since 2012. Collaboration networks among authors and institutions are generally loose, with limited cross-regional and interdisciplinary cooperation. Research hotspots have evolved from occupational health, cotton-dust exposure, and wastewater treatment toward textile-waste valorization, circular economy, smart manufacturing, quality prediction, and low-carbon mill design. A critical synthesis of representative studies further indicates that future research should strengthen quantifiable network analysis, digital-twin and BB-based mill planning, worker-health protection, microplastic-emission control, and industry-university-enterprise collaboration, particularly in emerging western textile bases such as Xinjiang.