Global trends and status in landfilling research: a systematic analysis

Despite the increasing amount of waste being reused, recycled, or energetically valorized, landfills continue to play an important role in waste management strategies. Many researchers have studied various aspects of landfilling, regarding positive or negative features. However, a few of them have summarized the related literature, resulted in a lack of overall progress understanding. This paper aimed to perform a bibliometric analysis of landfilling research during 2000–2017. Various aspects, such as document types, languages, major journals, key countries, authors, and keywords were all systematically analyzed. The collaborations among authors and countries were wholly constructed, visualized, and evaluated through the application of social network analysis based on co-authorship relations. Moreover, to discover the most leading topics on landfill discussion, keyword clustering analysis was conducted using co-occurrences relations. The research showed that the number of landfill-related publications has significantly increased within the period. Regarding both quality and quantity, the United States was the most leading country. As well, Rowe, R.K., from Canada, was quantitatively the most productive author. The findings of this study indicated that landfill leachate was the most studied topic in the literature. Besides, the keywords “global warming” and “sustainability” had the highest rate of growth during the studied period. This paper also demonstrated that the most productive countries in landfill research have had a significant contribution to decrease the total amount of landfilling using other waste disposal alternatives (such as incineration with/without energy recovery) or waste management strategies.