Exploring the last 50 years of Indian research on the impact of coal mining using bibliometric analysis with an overview of water-related impacts

Abstract

This paper throws light on the bibliometric review of the impact of coal mining in India over the past 50 years, emphasizing environmental, especially water-related impacts. The data were refined from the Web of Science database and analyzed in a bibliometric map visualization software tool, VOSviewer, to grasp the research focus, status quo and analyze the trend and direction of the work being carried out in this area. The methodology was covered in three phases: search and document selection, software and data extraction, and analysis of results and trends. The study results indicated that (i) the publication has increased in the past two decades (2001-2021) with a steep increase in the period from 2010 to 2021 with 74.68% article types documents and a mere 7.74% review documents. (ii) In India, the significant contribution is made by the Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad with Department of Science and Technology as a primary funding agency. (iii) The bibliometric map of co-occurrence of author keywords showed that keywords relating to the "pollution" (connected to air, water) from "Jharia coalfield" have highest occurrences in the relevant published works of literature and topics like "reclamation," "mine spoil," and application of approaches like "remote sensing and GIS" have lower linkage strengths in general. (iv) The result of the co-citation network study has marked the most significant authors and the highly cited sources of the database revealing Ghose M.K. and Singh A.K. as among the most cited authors with citations more than 150 in the field of our interest. (v) The trend of publication in the research area of Water Resources showed a significant increase after 2015. The keyword occurrence map reveals that water quality studies have been extensively studied, but quantifications of the coal mining-induced changes in water regimes at river basin scales are absent.

Keywords: Bibliometric analysis; Co-citation; Co-occurrence; Coal mining; VOSviewer; Visualization; Web of Science.