Research trend analysis of anaerobic fermentation based on the Web of Science database

Abstract In order to gain an in-depth understanding of the global status and frontier trends of anaerobic-fermentation-related research, bibliometric analysis was used to statistically analyse the relevant research papers included in the SCI-Expanded database from 2001 to 2020 with “anaerobic ferment*” as the search keyword. Amongst the top 10 research institutions, eight were from China and two were from Australia, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences ranks first in the number of publications. Biotechnology & Applied Microbiology, Energy & Fuels, Engineering and Ecology are the mainstream fields with the largest number of publications on anaerobic fermentation. The analysis of keywords revealed that the development of cheap and easily available raw materials with high organic matter content, the production of clean energy substances and high value-added platform products, and the anaerobic biorefinery processes with co-production of multiple products, will continue to become global research hotspots in future research.