Abstract
In recent years, white rot fungi (WRFs) have received tremendous attention as a biotechnological tool for environmental pollution control. In order to systematically and comprehensively describe the progress, trends, and hotspots of WRF biotechnology in the field of environmental pollution control, the 3967 related publications from 2003 to 2020 were collected from Web of Science Core Collection database, and the bibliometric characteristics including publication output, country, institution, journal, author, citation frequency, h-index, and research focus were evaluated by using Excel 2007, CiteSpace V, and VOSviewer. The results indicated that the number of research publications increased rapidly before 2009, but after that, the number of publications fluctuated in a certain range. China and USA were the most productive countries and the most active country in international cooperation. In this field, most authors tend to cooperate within a small group. The journal and subject category with the largest number of publications are “International Biodeterioration & Biodegradation” and “Biotechnology Applied Microbiology”, respectively. The analysis of high-frequency keywords revealed that “laccase”, “biodegradation”, “decolorization”, and “Phanerochaete chrysosporium” were the most cited terms among all publications. The pretreatment of biomass waste, decolorization of dye wastewater, and bioremediation of polluted environment are the key research directions of WRF biotechnology. Finally, the frontier topics and active authors in this research field were identified using burst detection. We believe that this bibliometric study provides a comprehensive and systematic overview and promoted the future cooperative research and knowledge exchange in this field of WRF biotechnology for environmental applications.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11356-021-15787-1.
Highlights
The rapid development of industrial activities has greatly increased the release of toxic and harmful substances into the environment, and the contamination of soil, water, and air by toxic and harmful chemicals has become one of the major environmental problems in the world today
Scientific output data was extracted from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC), which is one of the most widely used databases in academic and bibliometric studies and allows the download of full citation records with new records being updated every day (AlRyalat et al 2019)
A total of 3967 records related to White rot fungus (WRF) biotechnology for environmental application was identified which are classified into eight document types indexed in the WoS (Table 1)
Summary
The rapid development of industrial activities has greatly increased the release of toxic and harmful substances into the environment, and the contamination of soil, water, and air by toxic and harmful chemicals has become one of the major environmental problems in the world today. Another review by Huang et al (2018) introduced the trends in the application of WRF biocatalysis and its related combined technology such as adsorption of nanomaterials, for biotransformation of endocrine-disrupting compounds. He et al (2017) proposed that in the process of wastewater treatment, nanoparticles as supports or synergist can improve the biodegradation performance and stability of WRF. In a recent review, Zhuo and Fan (2021) comprehensively document the application of WRF and their lignocellulolytic enzymes for removing organic pollutants and highlighted potential problems and intriguing observations
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