Global Research on Contaminated Soil Remediation: A Bibliometric Network Analysis

Abstract

Soil is an important aspect of the ecosystem that plays a crucial role in human population sustainability. Due to natural and anthropogenic activity, soil pollution has become a major environmental issue around the world. Since 1985, researchers have been studying the prevention and treatment of polluted soils. This study used bibliometric approaches to evaluate the soil remediation dataset in the Web of Science database during 2001–2020 to show current research trends and hot themes in quantitative analysis and soil remediation around the world. The findings suggest that the area of soil remediation has entered a period of rapid advancement. China excelled over all other countries in terms of the number of independent and collaborative articles published across soil pollution research worldwide. The findings revealed that the leading journals in the field of soil remediation include Science of the Total Environment, Microchemical Journal, and Journal of Hazardous Materials. Following closely behind the Chinese Academy of Sciences (428) and Zhejiang University (106) was the Russian Academy of Sciences (87). Furthermore, keyword frequency and co-word analyses showed the most important research subjects. Among them, the hot themes were recognized as “heavy metals”, “PAHs”, “bioremediation”, “phytoremediation”, and “electrokinetic remediation”. Understanding the current situation in soil remediation as well as providing directions for future research are the goals of this study.