Exploring the spatial-temporal variations and policy-based driving force behind groundwater contamination and remediation research in past decades

Groundwater has been recognized as one of the most critical and vulnerable natural sources which is utilized in potable water supply, agricultural irrigation, and industrial manufacture worldwide. In past decades, groundwater issues have drawn more and more attention and enable groundwater contamination and remediation research achieve dramatic development. This study depicted the spatial-temporal evolution of groundwater contamination and remediation research by evaluating related literatures published from 1989 to 2017 based on databases of Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, Conference Proceedings Citation Index-Sci, and Conference Proceedings Citation Index-Social Science and Humanities with Bibliometric Analysis and explored the policy-based driving force with laws and regulations collected from United States Code (U.S. Code) system and Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) system behind those variations. The results demonstrated a rapid growth of groundwater contamination and remediation–related publications, and the USA identified as the leading country in terms of contributing the largest number of articles and possessing the greatest influence. From the temporal view, scholars from different countries have made in-depth studies in the fields of groundwater, pollutants and groundwater quality, remediation materials, and remediation approaches. The spatial analysis demonstrated America and Asia are the two continents that have published the most articles. In the past decades, the evolutionary progress of groundwater research is demonstrated that the hot spots are developed from groundwater contamination and remediation to more specific researches. Simultaneously, laws and regulations about groundwater are developed as well and to some extent, those laws and regulations boost the development of groundwater contamination and remediation research publications. These findings, as important references, could be utilized to depict the evolutionary progress of groundwater contamination and remediation research and explore the directions and trends of this specific research field in the future.