Visualizing Hotspots and Future Trends in Phytomining Research Through Scientometrics

Abstract

Phytomining has attracted widespread attention as a technique for harvesting “bio-ore.” This technology has potential applications in the metal and minerals industry for low-grade metal and mineral mining as well as metal recycling from polluted soil. The hotspots and future trends of this technology deserve in-depth exploration. This paper presents a systematic review of the phytomining research area through the scientometrics method based on the citation data collected from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC). The results show that the earliest phytomining-related research was published in 1997. Between 1997 and 2019, 232 publications were published in 109 journals. Plant and Soil, the International Journal of Phytoremediation, and the Journal of Geochemical Exploration were the top three most prolific journals and accounted for 18.1% of these publications. Guillaume Echevarria, J.L. Morel, and Antony Van der Ent were the top three most prolific authors, and their work accounted for 40.1% of these publications. The cluster results of document co-citation analysis revealed that the hotspots in phytomining research area mainly includes “nickel accumulation,” “heavy metal uptake,” “mining site,” “heavy metal,” “hyperaccumulation yield,” “growth effect,” and “alternative method.” Keyword burst detection results find that the hot topics have changed over time from “phytomining” to “agromining”; from “contaminated soil” to “serpentine soil”; and from “mechanism” to “phytomining process” and “commercial phytoextraction.” This study describes the intellectual landscape of research and provides future research directions for phytomining research so that researchers can identify future research topics and partners.