Systematic assessment on the remediation of Bisphenol A in the global environments: a mixed method analysis of research outputs

Abstract

Bisphenol A (BPA) is an endocrine-disrupting compound and a mutagenic agent that poses health hazards to living organisms, making it a global contaminant. Several remediation techniques have been reported in the literature, however, a mixed-method science mapping analysis of research trends on BPA is still lacking. The present study aimed to investigate global research trends in BPA remediation. Published research papers on BPA remediation indexed in Web of Science, PubMed, and Scopus between 1992 and 2021 were analysed qualitatively and quantitatively using science mapping algorithms including Rstudio, bibliometrix package and R Version 4.2.1. The thematic areas were determined using k-means clustering of the author-keywords while Porter’s stemming algorithm was used to stemmed inflectional terms to their roots. Overall, 640 documents were published by 1903 authors with 2.07 authors/article and 0.336 article/author, 4.31 co-authors/article, an annual growth rate of 17.35% and a collaboration index of 2.99. Research productivity increased from 1 article in 1992 to 93 articles in 2021. The citations of the topmost 23 articles ranged from 365 to 109 and the total citation per year ranged from 45.6 to 27.3. China (n = 267, 41.7%), Japan (n = 53, 8.3%), USA (n = 33, 5.2%) and Korea (n = 28, 4.4%) were respectively the top four countries based on the total of published articles and overall citation. There were 48 relevant keywords dominated by Bisphenol A, adsorption, biodegradation, and peroximonosulphate. The present analysis identifies research accomplishment, focus and gaps on Bisphenol A remediation and offer the researchers the information needed to forecast future research priorities that can help policymakers and governments to internationalize collaborations and create research curricula that can remediate BPA on a global scale.