Bibliometric analysis of global research on white rot fungi biotechnology for environmental application

Abstract

In recent years, white rot fungi (WRF) have received tremendous attention as a biotechnological tool for environmental pollution control. Although there are a large number of research articles and reviews concerning WRF biotechnology in environmental application, to our knowledge no bibliometric research of this topic has been published. This study used bibliometric method to evaluated 3962 related publications collected from Web of Science Core Collection database published between 2003 and 2020. The results indicated that China was the most productive country, while the USA is the most active country in international cooperation. The closest international collaborative networks were evidenced between the USA and China. Most authors tend to cooperate within a small group, which leads to the lack of effective cooperation among different groups. The most prominent journals in this field were “International Biodeterioration & Biodegradation” and “Bioresource Technology”, and “Biotechnology Applied Microbiology” was the most popular subject category. The analysis of high-frequency keywords revealed that “laccase”, “biodegradation”, “decolorization” and “Phanerochaete chrysosporium” were the most cited terms among all publications, and that the hottest topics focus on pretreatment of biomass waste by WRF, decolorization of dye wastewater by WRF, and bioremediation of polluted environment by WRF, etc. Finally, the frontier topics and active authors in this research field were identified using burst detection. This bibliometric study promoted the future cooperative research and knowledge exchange by visualizing the recent developments and future trends in WRF biotechnology for environmental applications.

Bibliometric analysis of global research on fungal Metarhizium rileyi based on Web of Science

“…Scientific production data were 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 complete records of citations, with new records being updated every day (Xiao et al., 2021). As it is a public database, ethical approval was not required.…”