Historical perspectives on gas hydrates and citation impact analysis

Gas hydrates, or clathrate hydrates, is a multidisciplinary field of research involving potential applications to the oil and gas industry, energy security, and innovative technological applications with literature referenced back to 1810. The field of gas hydrates or clathrate hydrates has progressed over the past several decades from academic curiosity-driven research to industrially relevant research related to flow assurance and methane hydrates in nature as an energy resource. In the recent few decades, several innovative and sustainable applications have emerged with gas hydrate or clathrate hydrate as a technology enabler. In this work, I present a bibliometric analysis of the field of gas hydrates or clathrate hydrates for the period from 1901 to 2020 from the Web of Science core collection database of Clarivate Analytics. In total, 12 152 journal publications (review and original research articles) were analyzed from Web of Science core collection database spanning 121 years (1901–2020). Top countries, top cited review articles, and original research articles along with top source titles (journals) are identified and highlighted. In addition, the field classifications and citation rate trends have been analyzed and presented. Network visualization maps are presented for countries, sources, and organizations by analysing citations in VOSviewer. Co-occurrence analysis is performed to identify the top keywords and their links through network visualization based on VOSviewer.