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Global research hotspots and trends on microplastics: a bibliometric analysis

Environmental Science and Pollution Research 2023 26 citations ? Citation count from OpenAlex, updated daily. May differ slightly from the publisher's own count. Score: 45 ? 0–100 AI score estimating relevance to the microplastics field. Papers below 30 are filtered from public browse.
Mehri Davtalab, Steigvilë Byčenkienė, Ieva Uogintė

Summary

A bibliometric analysis of microplastics publications from 1990 to 2022 found a 19-fold increase in publications and 35-fold increase in citations since 2015, with research clustering around distribution, toxicity, analytical methods, and adsorption of co-pollutants.

In recent years, microplastics have become an integral part of the terrestrial and aquatic environments, which is one of the major concerns of communities around the world. Therefore, it is necessary to know the current status of studies and feasible potentials in the future. This study, conducted an in-depth bibliometric analysis of publications from 1990 to 2022 to present the influential countries, authors, institutes, papers, and journals on microplastics. Findings reveal that there has been a steady increase in microplastic publications and citations in recent years. And, the number of publications and citations has increased 19 and 35 times since 2015. Besides, we performed a comprehensive keyword analysis to show the significant keywords and clusters in this field. In particular, this study used the TF-IDF method as a text-mining analysis to extract the new keywords used in recent years (i.e., 2020-2022). New keywords can draw the attention of scholars to important issues and provide a basis for future research directions.

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