Bibliometric analysis of research trends in microbial fuel cells for wastewater treatment

Abstract

Recent trends of microbial fuel cells or MFC research have targeted the ability of such technologies to become economically and technically viable. It is important to address the critical scientific inquiries in this area using research metrics. The reported MFC systems have shown applicability towards bioremediation and bioelectricity production, however, the need for creating scalable architecture which can treat real time wastewater has extended the research further. It is therefore important to provide a comprehensive analysis of the networks that has allowed these developments. The most important publications, authors, papers, countries, and keywords in the context of wastewater treatment using MFCs have been examined in this article. This covers the timeline between January 2013 to August 2023. This article also highlights the trends and developments that have arisen because of these examinations in the last decade. The visualization for the bibliometric analysis was done using VOSViewer with the publication data retrieved from the SCOPUS database. The analysis will help better understand current MFC research statistics for wastewater treatment and would help new researchers identify leading communities in this field for developing key insights. The highest number of publications are from China, United States, and India.