Department of Nursing, The Second Hospital of Nanjing, Nursing, Nanjing Hospital Affiliated to Nanjing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Nanjing, 210003, China.
Key Laboratory of Poyang Lake Environment and Resource Utilization, Ministry of Education, School of Resource and Environment, Nanchang University, Nanchang, 330031, China.
Chemosphere. 2023 Aug;331:138775. doi: 10.1016/j.chemosphere.2023.138775. Epub 2023 Apr 24.
The COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted public health and the worldwide economy. The overstretched operation of health systems around the world is accompanied by potential and ongoing environmental threats. At present, comprehensive scientific assessments of research on temporal changes in medical/pharmaceutical wastewater (MPWW), as well as estimations of researcher networks and scientific productivity are lacking. Therefore, we conducted a thorough literature study, using bibliometrics to reproduce research on medical wastewater over nearly half a century. Our primary goal is systematically to map the evolution of keyword clusters over time, and to obtain the structure and credibility of clusters. Our secondary objective was to measure research network performance (country, institution, and author) using CiteSpace and VOSviewer. We extracted 2306 papers published between 1981 and 2022. The co-cited reference network identified 16 clusters with well-structured networks (Q = 0.7716, S = 0.896). The main trends were as follows: 1) Early MPWW research prioritized sources of wastewater, and this cluster was considered to be the mainstream research frontier and direction, representing an important source and priority research area. 2) Mid-term research focused on characteristic contaminants and detection technologies. Particularly during 2000-2010, a period of rapid developments in global medical systems, pharmaceutical compounds (PhCs) in MPWW were recognized as a major threat to human health and the environment. 3) Recent research has focused on novel degradation technologies for PhC-containing MPWW, with high scores for research on biological methods. Wastewater-based epidemiology has emerged as being consistent with or predictive of the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases. Therefore, the application of MPWW in COVID-19 tracing will be of great interest to environmentalists. These results could guide the future direction of funding agencies and research groups.
新型冠状病毒肺炎疫情对全球公共卫生和经济造成了严重影响。全球各地的卫生系统不堪重负，同时还面临着潜在的和正在出现的环境威胁。目前，对于医疗/制药废水中（MPWW）的时间变化的研究缺乏全面的科学评估，以及对研究人员网络和科学生产力的估计。因此，我们进行了一次彻底的文献研究，使用文献计量学方法重现了近半个世纪以来关于医疗废水的研究。我们的主要目标是系统地绘制关键词群随时间的演变图，并获取群的结构和可信度。我们的次要目标是使用 CiteSpace 和 VOSviewer 衡量研究网络的性能（国家、机构和作者）。我们共提取了 1981 年至 2022 年期间发表的 2306 篇论文。共被引参考文献网络确定了 16 个具有良好结构网络的聚类（Q=0.7716，S=0.896）。主要趋势如下：1）早期的 MPWW 研究优先考虑废水来源，该聚类被认为是主流研究前沿和方向，代表了一个重要的源头和优先研究领域。2）中期研究侧重于特征污染物和检测技术。特别是在 2000-2010 年期间，全球医疗系统迅速发展，MPWW 中的药物化合物（PhCs）被认为是对人类健康和环境的主要威胁。3）近期研究集中在含有 PhC 的 MPWW 的新型降解技术上，生物方法的研究得分较高。基于废水的流行病学与已确诊的 COVID-19 病例数量一致或具有预测性。因此，MPWW 在 COVID-19 追踪中的应用将引起环保主义者的极大兴趣。这些结果可以指导未来资助机构和研究小组的方向。
