Worldwide Research Analysis on Natural Zeolites as Environmental Remediation Materials

Abstract

Society faces a significant problem in regards to the spread of harmful products in the environment, primarily caused by accelerated growth and resource consumption. Consequently, there is a need for materials to be processed in less harmful ways and to remedy the contaminated sources they generate. Microporous materials have been studied for a long time and are used in waste treatment alternatives. Natural zeolites, on which this study is based, are attractive to the scientific and technological communities, due to their numerous applications as decontaminants and adsorption properties. This study analyzes the intellectual structures of publications related to natural zeolites in environmental remediation, using bibliometric methods to determine their volumes and trends. The methodology comprises of an analysis based on 1582 articles, using VOSviewer software, with data from 1974 to 2020, via the Scopus database. Results reflect a notable increase in publications from the end of the 1990s; the greatest contribution in the area comes from Eurasian countries. The study considers that development in this line of research will continue to increase and serve as a great contribution to preserve the environment in coming years, with themes that focus on water treatment (e.g., drinking water, wastewater, greywater), removal of heavy metals, ammonium, ammonia, and construction.

Worldwide Research on Open Innovation in SMEs

“…Thus, Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases are widely used, e.g., [68,87,88]. However, in the present study, Scopus is selected for the following reasons: (i) it presents a wide coverage of scientific output in the various areas of knowledge by indexing 66% more journals than WoS [89]; (ii) it has better coverage (in terms of time) compared to other databases [90]; (iii) it has indicators of the quality of scientific outputs, such as Citescore or Scimago Journal Rank (SJR) [89]; (iv) ease of access to bibliographic sources [91]; and (v) institutional access availability.…”

“…This network shows the cognitive structure of the field of study, called bibliometric maps or science maps [98]. These maps allow a close analysis of the structure from its nuclear (co-occurrence of keywords), meso (co-citation of cited authors) and peripheral (co-citation of cited journals) parts [91,99]. Various academic disciplines implement this software to analyse cognitive structures [100][101][102][103][104][105].…”

A Short Review on the Utilization of Incense Sticks Ash as an Emerging and Overlooked Material for the Synthesis of Zeolites

“…Such zeolites, due to their unique structure, are filled up with water molecules and show honeycomb-like structures when losing water upon heating [47]. The best example is chabazite, which are the most commonly used natural zeolites [48]. The clinoptilolites zeolites have been used in agriculture, fertilizer, soil amendments and feed additives due to their higher acid-resistant Si content.…”

Worldwide Research Trends in Landslide Science

“…The proposal focuses on the quantitative evaluation of an academic field of study by analyzing its structure, characteristics and existing relationships, which allows examining its behaviour between the disciplines of a specific field of study [41,42]. The bibliometric analysis allows identifying research areas (current and future) and the analysis of their multidisciplinary production, achieving a more systematic comprehensive evaluation in the field of study [43,44].…”