I am thrilled to share that our latest work, “Bibliometric Insights into Pollution Research: Trends, Geographic Disparities, and Emerging Environmental Challenges”, has been accepted for publication in Environmental Research Communications. The paper link is: Link.
What did we do?
Our team conducted one of the most comprehensive, large-scale bibliometric analyses of global pollution research to date. We analyzed over 735,000 publications spanning 1990–2024, using advanced Python-based pipelines and parallel computing to process and classify this massive dataset efficiently. Leveraging high-performance computing was crucial for extracting research trends, collaboration networks, topic dynamics, and even sentiment patterns from such a big data landscape.
Key findings:
📈 Pollution research has exploded over the past three decades, but there are still stark geographic imbalances—many developing regions with severe pollution burdens remain underrepresented in the scientific literature.
🌏 Collaboration is dominated by developed countries, with limited engagement from low-income nations.
🏷️ Research focus is heavily weighted toward scientific and engineering solutions, while education and economic strategies receive far less attention.
🔬 Emerging issues like microplastics and cross-media pollution (e.g., air-to-water transfers) are gaining traction, but integrated, cross-disciplinary approaches are still rare.
📝 Our sentiment analysis revealed that papers from underrepresented regions and on emerging pollution issues tend to have more negative tones, reflecting greater concern or urgency.
Why does this matter?
Pollution is a global problem requiring not only technical innovation, but also international cooperation, policy reform, and public engagement. Our findings highlight urgent gaps and call for more inclusive, interdisciplinary, and action-oriented research—especially in parts of the world that need it most.
Open Science:
All our code and data processing pipelines are available for the community at: Link
A huge thank you to all collaborators and supporters!