- Title
- Microplastics in terrestrial ecosystems: A scientometric analysis
- Creator
- He, Donghui; Bristow, Keith; Filipović, Vilim; Lv, Jialong; He, Hailong
- Date
- 2020
- Type
- Text; Journal article
- Identifier
- http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/190133
- Identifier
- vital:17561
- Identifier
-
https://doi.org/10.3390/su12208739
- Identifier
- ISSN:2071-1050
- Abstract
- Microplastics, as an emerging contaminant, have been shown to threaten the sustainability of ecosystems, and there is also concern about human exposure, as microplastic particles tend to bioaccumulate and biomagnify through the food chain. While microplastics in marine environments have been extensively studied, research on microplastics in terrestrial ecosystems is just starting to gain momentum. In this paper, we used scientometric analysis to understand the current status of microplastic research in terrestrial systems. The global scientific literature on microplastics in terrestrial ecosystems, based on data from the Web of Science between 1986 and 2020, was explored with the VOSviewer scientometric software. Co-occurrence visualization maps and citation analysis were used to identify the relationship among keywords, authors, organizations, countries, and journals focusing on the issues of terrestrial microplastics. The results show that research on microplastics in terrestrial systems just started in the past few years but is increasing rapidly. Science of the Total Environment ranks first among the journals publishing papers on terrestrial microplastics. In addition, we also highlighted the desire to establish standards/protocols for extracting and quantifying microplastics in soils. Future studies are recommended to fill the knowledge gaps on the abundance, distribution, ecological and economic effects, and toxicity of microplastics.
- Publisher
- MDPI AG
- Relation
- Sustainability Vol. 12, no. 20 (2020), p. 8739
- Rights
- All metadata describing materials held in, or linked to, the repository is freely available under a CC0 licence
- Rights
- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Rights
- © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license
- Rights
- Open Access
- Subject
- Agriculture; Bibliometric analysis; Bibliometrics; Bioaccumulation; Citation analysis; Co authorship; Co-occurrence; Coauthorship; Contaminants; Ecological effects; Economic impact; Ecosystems; Environmental economics; Environmental science; Food chains; Plastic pollution; Marine ecosystems; Marine environment; Microplastics; Plastic debris; Plastics; Publication trends; Recycling; Scientometrics; Soil; Soil contamination; Sustainability; Terrestrial ecosystems; Terrestrial environments; Toxicity; Trends; 41 Environmental Sciences
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