A Bibliometric Study on Integrated Solar Combined Cycles (ISCC), Trends and Future Based on Data Analytics Tools

Abstract

In this paper, a bibliometric analysis was performed in order to analyze the state of the art and publication trends on the topic of ISCC (Integrated Solar Combined Cycles) for the period covering 1990 to July 2020. The Web of Science (WOS) database was consulted, and 1277 publications from 3157 different authors and 1102 different institutions, distributed among 78 countries, were retrieved as the corpus of the study. The VOSViewer software tool was used for the post-processing of the WOS corpus, and for the network data mapping. Multiple bibliometric indicators, such as the number of citations, keyword occurrences, the authors’ affiliations, and the authors, among others, were analysed in this paper in order to find the main research trends on the ISCC topic. The analysis performed in this paper concluded that the main publication source for ISCC research was Energy Conversion and Management, in terms of the total number of publications (158), but Solar Energy had the highest number of citations on the ISCC topic (4438). It was also found that China was the most productive country in terms of ISCC publications (241), and the Chinese Academy of Sciences was the most productive institution (52). Nevertheless, the author with the most publications on ISCC was I. Dincer, from Ontario Tech University (24). Based on publication keywords, a series of recommendations for future developments in the ISCC topic were derived, as well as the ways in which those ideas are connected to the global state of solar energy research.

Quo Vadis Solar Energy Research?

“…Regarding bibliometric studies on solar energy research, some examples analyze the existing solar energy literature between 1992 and 2011 [23], the analysis of solar power-related publications between 1991 and 2010 [24], or the analysis of open innovation in solar energy research between 2000 and 2014 [25]. There are some works about more detailed studies regarding the integration of combined cycles with concentrating solar power plants [26], others referring to the state of the art of solar cooling technologies [27] and the analysis of research tendencies on photovoltaic solar energy management [28].…”