Abstract
Reverse osmosis is a treatment process to produce highly purified water in wastewater management. However, the depth study on exploring and visualization of the publication in this area has not been made in detail. Hence, this study is designed to assess the worldwide research trends of the reverse osmosis field in terms of publication output, keywords, journals, countries, institutions, collaborations, research areas, authors, document types, and languages. This study aims to analyze the distribution patterns of reverse osmosis journal articles, the terminology, and the research topics. A bibliometric analysis was conducted on 6,939 research articles obtained from the Web of Science (WOS) database that were published from 1970 to 2019. The bibliometric map and network were generated using VOSviewer software. Results have shown that the most related keywords are desalination and nanofiltration. The most preferred journal with 40,314 total citations was published by Elsevier. Researchers from the United States contributed the most global publications. The most productive academic institution was the National University of Singapore among 25 leading countries. The reverse osmosis topic is mostly used in Engineering and Water Resources area. The researchers from South Korea were the most productive authors in this area. The findings of this study will enable interested researchers to understand the performance of reverse osmosis research worldwide and provide recommendations for further research.
Highlights
Over the past 40 years, reverse osmosis membrane technology has grown to 44% of the world's desalination capacity and 80% of the world's total number of desalination plants
This study aims to analyze the reputation and trends of reverse osmosis research from 1970 to 2019 to help other researchers understand the overview of reverse osmosis research worldwide and predict the dynamic directions of the research
This paper evaluated a summary of the developments in reverse osmosis process research based on 6,938
Summary
Over the past 40 years, reverse osmosis membrane technology has grown to 44% of the world's desalination capacity and 80% of the world's total number of desalination plants. Reverse osmosis membranes are the leading technology for modern desalination plants. In the previous work of Tanaka and Ho (2011) [4] about global trends of desalination for the period 1991 to 2008, reverse osmosis was part of the discussion. They claimed that more research was recorded in earlier years and recently on marine desalination, incredibly on reverse osmosis. Most of the research focused only on Environment and Ecology Research 9(3): 134-143, 2021 desalination instead of focusing on the method of desalination, such as reverse osmosis
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