The Research Landscape of Biorefinery: A Scientometrics Viewpoint

Abstract

The scientometrics study of the publications set devoted to biorefinery allows to characterize the research field, its dynamics, most relevant countries, institutions, and authors, cooperation, thematic structure, and publishing praxis. The permanent and fast increase of biorefinery publications started in 2001 and will be approximated by the power function, which allows predicting a further increase in the number of biorefinery publications. The leading producers of publications are European Union countries, European Economic Area countries and Switzerland together, the USA, PR China, Brazil, and India, but the output of 76 countries have been at least 10 publications since 1981. The proportion of internationally coauthored publications was 33.0% during 2018-2021, and six clusters of more close cooperating countries are recognized. The keywords cooccurrence analysis allows recognition of 4 subfields of research: biorefinery itself and biofuels, wood chemistry, algae and biotechnology, and alcohol production. The citation characteristics of biorefinery publications are substantially higher than the values of the corresponding research fields, and the top journals are preferred for the dissemination of research results.