Research trends on nitrate removal: a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Nitrate contamination has become an increasing problem globally and has aroused the interests of researchers. The present research was designed to evaluate the global scientific outputs in the Institute of Scientific Information subject category of “nitrate removal” for the past 20 years, based on the online version of the Science Citation Index Expanded, Web of Science, from 1991 to 2010. Articles related to nitrate removal were assessed from the aspect of distributions of source countries, institutes, the distributions of words in the title, author keywords, and KeyWords Plus. The new method named “word cluster analysis” was also employed to further investigate the research status on nitrate removal. Three categories including removal field, removal methods, and product were also introduced to analyze the research trends in nitrate removal. The results showed that researchers paid most attention to “soil” and “water” in the removal field. “Denitrification” possessed the largest percentage among the removal methods, indicating that biological means were dominated for nitrate removal. Moreover, “nitrogen” as the ideal product of nitrate removal was the most predominant among the product, which was the goal of the technique for nitrate removal. The impacts of the most cited articles each year were also discussed with the article life information.

Keywords:

• Scientometrics
• Research trend
• Nitrate removal
• Denitrification

Acknowledgements

Financial support is gratefully acknowledged from the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2011YYL109).