A bibliometric analysis of industrial wastewater research : current trends and future prospects

Global industrialization is accelerated under the driving force of developing countries’ rapid economic development. Water pollution is inevitably worsened due to lagging investment in basic treatment infrastructure. Wastewater treatment cannot rely on just one treatment technique, so research in this field has attracted much attention to satisfy stringent recovery and emissions standards increasingly imposed on industrial wastewater. This case study is a bibliometric analysis conducted to evaluate industrial wastewater treatment research from 1991 to 2014, based on the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) database. Journal of Chemical Technology and Biotechnology is the leading journal in this field, publishing 3.8 % of articles over this period, followed by Journal of Hazardous Materials and Water Research, the latter of which has the highest impact factor and h-index of all journals in this field. India and the Chinese Academy of Sciences were the most productive country and institution, respectively, while the USA, was the most internationally collaborative and had the highest h-index (82) of all countries. A new method named “word cluster analysis” was successfully applied to trace the research hotspots. Innovation in treatment methods is thought to relate to the growth in volume and increase in complexity of industrial wastewater, as well as to policy decisions in developing countries that encourage effective industrial wastewater treatment.