Research trends in electrochemical technology for water and wastewater treatment

It is difficult to completely degrade wastewater containing refractory pollutants without secondary pollution by biological treatment, as well as physical–chemical process. Therefore, electrochemical technology has attracted much attention for its environmental compatibility, high removal efficiency, and potential cost effectiveness, especially on the industrial wastewater treatment. An effective bibliometric analysis based on the Science Citation Index Core Collection database was conducted to evaluate electrochemical technology for water and wastewater treatment related research from 1994 to 2013. The amount of publications significantly increased in the last two decades. Journal of the Electrochemical Society published the most articles in this field with a top h-index of 90, taking 5.8 % of all, followed by Electrochimica Acta and Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry. The researchers focused on categories of chemistry, electrochemistry, and materials science. China and Chinese Academy of Sciences were the most productive country and institution, respectively, while the USA, with the most international collaborative articles and highest h-index of 130, was the major collaborator with 15 other countries in top 20 most productive countries. Moreover, based on the analysis of author keywords, title, abstract, and ‘KeyWords Plus’, a new method named “word cluster analysis” was successfully applied to trace the research hotspot. Nowadays, researchers mainly focused on novel anodic electrode, especially on its physiochemical and electrochemical properties. © 2015, The Author(s).