Applications of microfluidic technology in food sector: A bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Over the past few years, microfluidic technology has gained significant attention because of its miniaturized system and provides several advantages over a conventional macroscale system. The purpose of the present study is to identify the global research trends of the applications of microfluidics in food analysis and processing. The data mining was performed using the search keywords “Microfluidics OR microfluidic” AND food (TITLE-ABS-KEY) which resulted in 745 documents after the evaluation and filtration for relevant documents based on the Scopus database. Out of this, 478 (64.16 %) were articles, 140 (18.8 %) were review papers, conference papers (95, 12.75 %), book chapters (26, 3.49 %), and others (6, 0.8 %). The record indicated that the first document in food microfluidics was published in 2003. It was observed that 72.08 % of the documents have been published in the last 6 years (2015-2020). China and the United States were the most productive countries in food microfluidics research during the period of assessment. Purdue University was the leading organization with 31 documents and 816 total citations. Yanbin Li was found to be the most prolific author with 20 publications. The analysis demonstrated that Biosensors and Bioelectronics and Lab on a Chip were the most active journals in terms of the number of publications and citations, respectively. This study showed that the application of microfluidics in the food sector is relatively new and the field is still in the developing stage. It is anticipated that intensive research activities will be carried out worldwide.