Abstract
China relies heavily on coal for meeting its huge energy requirements, and strives for the clean utilization of coal. In this paper, a bibliometric and visualized analysis is carried out to quantitatively evaluate the academic output of China's coal research during 2000–2015. All academic publications (in English-language journals) with “COAL” in the title by Chinese authors were extracted from the Web of Science (SCI-EXPANDED) database. After examining 16989 articles published worldwide, China's share reached 28.9% and its annual publications had a more than 15-times increase over this period. ENERGY FUELS, ENGINEERING CHEMICAL, ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES and GEOSCIENCES MULTIDISCIPLINARY were the major subject categories. The top 20 journals together accounted for 46.0% of the journal articles by Chinese authors. China held five academic entities among the world's top 10 active institutions, and CHINA UNIVERSITY OF MINING TECHNOLOGY, CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY, HUAZHONG UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY and TAIYUAN UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY were the five most productive research institutes. The rich and vibrant activity of China's coal research in nearly all aspects of coal science was identified by the Wordle word-cloud analysis, focusing on coal mining, coal gasification or pyrolysis, coal combustion and pollutant control. The word frequencies of COMBUSTION, GAS, MINE, GASFICATION, ASH, PYROLYSIS, COAL-FIRED, BED, POWER, PULVERIZED, MINING and METHANE were the prevalent topics. CARBON, WATER, EMISSION and MERCURY were more prominent than the decade before. The evolution of research hotspots displayed noticeable variations to suit the country's coal research demand. As an international center of coal research, the present capacities and potentials of Chinese scientific community will continuously influence future directions of global coal research and clean coal technology development.
•A bibliometric and visualized analysis of China's coal research is carried out.•Subject categories, journals, institutions and citation performance are identified.•Research hotspots and topic shifts are revealed quantitatively and intuitionally.•Driving factors and future directions of China's coal research are elucidated.