A bibliometric study of the trend in articles related to eutrophication published in Science Citation Index

A keyword analysis was applied in this work to evaluate research trends of eutrophication papers published between 1991 and 2010 in any journal of all the subject categories of the Science Citation Index compiled by Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia, USA. Eutrophication was used as a keyword to search parts of titles, abstracts, or keywords. The published output analysis showed that eutrophication research steadily increased over the past 20 years and the annual publication output in 2008, 2009, 2010 were about four times that of 1991. The whole paper published by China ranked at 3rd, but these papers’ IF were lower than the average of the world. “Water Framework Directive” and “Life Cycle Assessment” were two of the most frequently used author keywords in the period between 1999 and 2010 whilst they did not appear before 1998. These new conception indicated eutrophication research trend was changing to policy and management from technological researches.