Global Research Trends and Chronological Evolution of Recycling of Mining Wastes: A Bibliometric Analysis

The current review uses bibliometric analysis to look into the global research trend and the chronological exploration record on the valorization/recycling of mining wastes. Up to 1841 publications were extracted from Scopus database. Their analyses of the chronology of scientific output since 1973 revealed a clear upward trend. Environmental Science, Engineering, Earth and Planetary Sciences were the most studied subject areas. The Journal of Cleaner Production was marked as the top productive journal for the reviewed topic. The USA, China, and Canada are the most productive countries in this subject. The analysis shows that, in comparison to other continents, the scientific contribution of African nations to the research question is too low. Based on the collected papers, which had 4157 keywords, only those that had at least five occurrences of a keyword were chosen (144 keywords) and analyzed by the VOSviewer software tool. Based on terms occurrences, the analyses indicate a research shift from studying heavy metals stabilization/solidification to circular economy and ecology. These results offer a global overview of academic papers on the reuse of mining wastes. Such a study can aid researchers in identifying the most recent trends and advancements in this field of study.