A Scientometric Analysis of Recent Literature on Arsenic Bioaccumulation and Biotransformation in Marine Ecosystems.

Abstract

Arsenic (As) bioaccumulation and biotransformation in marine ecosystems involve a number of fields and disciplines such as Environmental Sciences & Ecology, Marine & Freshwater Biology, and Toxicology. Arsenic research in these areas has been developing rapidly in recent years. It is crucial to keep up with the emerging trends and critical development of the collective knowledge. Therefore, a progressively synthesized network was achieved from 6396 original publications that cited 500 articles obtained from an initial topic search between 2010 and 2019. CiteSpace was used to analyze the progress and emerging trends. Results showed that these publications were divided into 13 different but closely related clusters. A major ongoing trend was identified in Cluster #3 and #5, concerning As and other heavy metals as heterogeneous complexants and assessing their overall impacts on human health. Other new emerging trends include evaluating the As profile in estuarial ecosystems and assessing its bioaccumulation and biotransformation along the food chain. Overall, the scientometric analytics of targeting literature performed in this review has offered a valuable and timely approach to evaluate the new emerging trends, providing researchers with up-to-date and critical information in research areas relevant to the searching topic.