Abstract
Sulfate contamination has become a global problem, which attracts wide concern of researchers in this field. In this study, a bibliometric analysis was employed to analyze the scientific outputs on sulfate removal, in terms of source countries, institutes, distribution of words in titles, author keywords, KeyWords Plus. Three categories including removal field, removal methods, and products have further contributed to revealing the research trends in the past 20 years, based on the online version of Science Citation Index Expanded, Web of Science from 1991 to 2010. It is concluded that researchers have paid most attention to desulfuration in water. This would probably continue as the main developing research trend, thus helping researchers establish future research directions in this area.
Acknowledgements
Financial support is gratefully acknowledged from the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2011YYL109) and the Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China (20120022120005).