Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
International Journal of Environmental Science and Technology, cilt.20, sa.5, ss.5715-5732, 2023 (SCI-Expanded)
© 2022, The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Iranian Society of Environmentalists (IRSEN) and Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University.In this paper, extensive research has been conducted over the past few years to determine heavy metal emissions, pollution, health risk assessments and mitigation strategies. The purpose of this work is to evaluate the bibliometric analysis of heavy metals in order to identify research trends, track research hot spots and determine future research directions. Therefore, an overview of heavy metal pollution studies in aquatic environments from 2015 to 2020 was obtained based on the following factors: chronological distribution, source journal analysis, country distribution and keyword co-occurrence analysis. Moreover, the existing policies and practices in the field of wastewater treatment were discussed and various prospective future research directions for scholars were proposed. The results indicate that most studies have been carried out in freshwater with a rate of 56%, with rivers being at the top of the list. China and the USA are the top two countries in terms of the number of articles published, and Environmental Science and Pollution Research (24, 15%) and Marine Pollution Bulletin (32, 18%) published the most articles based on freshwater and seawater, respectively. In addition, there has been an increasing emphasis on risk assessment strategies in recent years. The results indicate that bibliometric analysis is a useful method to qualitatively and quantitatively measure research hot spots and trends, and can be widely utilized to help new researchers in reviewing the available research in a particular research field.