Research and development trend of green mining: a bibliometric analysis

As green development has become a mainstream feature of modern development, green technology has become an inevitable trend in the development of mining technology, and related research on the subject continues to accumulate. Based on the bibliometric analysis of the green mining (GM) research from 2001 to 2020, we try to capture GM research and development trends from the perspective of global green development. The results show that the growth rate of GM research is much higher than that of conventional mining research, and the research results are growing rapidly. A visual collaborative network was created to identify the main research countries and author distribution and explore the most contributed journals. The research themes in GM show an evolution from sustainability theory to the application of green technologies in mines to the establishment of long-term mechanisms and policy regulation. The keyword co-occurrence results show that the current GM research covers the whole life cycle of mines. Soil, waste disposal, and recycling are long-standing research hotspots, and the most relevant articles are about resource recycling. Based on the keyword co-occurrence results, the proportion of restoration and management research has rapidly increased from 7.3 to 28.9%. Ecological restoration, reclamation and monitoring, remote sensing, and other technologies are more closely integrated usually accompanied by research related to evaluation and management. With the evolution of the theme, the research on GM is becoming more and more comprehensive. It reflects an extremely strong interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary character.