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Bibliometrics and visualization analysis regarding research on the development of microplastics

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Abstract

Microplastics have caused considerable harm to the environment and threatened human health due to their strong adsorption and hard biodegradation. Therefore, the research of microplastic received increasing attention recently, producing numbers of related achievements. To comprehensively grasp the quantitative information of published papers on “microplastics,” we analyzed the research progress and hotspots of “microplastics” through visualization software “VOSviewer.” The results show that the number of literature on microplastics published from 2009 to 2019 increased exponentially (R2 = 0.9873). The top 10 cited references are mainly in “zooplankton ingesting microplastics,” “microplastics in artificially cultivated bivalve,” “microplastics in surface waters such as lakes,” etc. The cutting-edge microplastics research is adsorption, biodegradation, ingestion and accumulation model, and toxicity analysis. In addition, the results predict that the combination of constructed wetland, biotechnology, and photocatalysis to remove microplastics will become new hotspots. The study provides researchers in microplastics with an overview of existing research and directional guidance for future research.

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Funding

This work was supported by the project of the Zhejiang Provincial Key Research and Development Program (No. 2021C02048), Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (No. LY18E080005), National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51709254), Support funds project of the Zhejiang Provincial Key Research and Development Program (No. 2019C03110), and Youth Innovation Promotion Association, Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. 2020335).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, 310012, Zhejiang, China

    Mengjiao Zhou & Yingfeng Xu

  2. State Key Laboratory of Freshwater Ecology and Biotechnology, Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, 430072, Hubei, China

    Rou Wang & Yi Zhang

  3. School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, 200092, China

    Shuiping Cheng

  4. Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100085, China

    Sha Luo

  5. Key Laboratory of Coastal Environment and Resources of Zhejiang Province, School of Engineering, Westlake University, Hangzhou, 310024, Zhejiang, China

    Lingwei Kong

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  1. Mengjiao Zhou
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  2. Rou Wang
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  3. Shuiping Cheng
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  4. Yingfeng Xu
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  5. Sha Luo
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  6. Yi Zhang
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  7. Lingwei Kong
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Contributions

Mengjiao Zhou and Lingwei Kong had the idea for the article; Yingfeng Xu, Rou Wang, and Yi Zhang performed the literature search and data analysis; and Mengjiao Zhou, Lingwei Kong, Shuiping Cheng, Sha Luo, Duofei Hu, and Yi Zhang drafted and/or critically revised the work. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Zhou, M., Wang, R., Cheng, S. et al. Bibliometrics and visualization analysis regarding research on the development of microplastics. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 8953–8967 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-12366-2

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