Four decades in fires research – A bibliometric analysis about the impact on mineralogy and nutrients

As wildfires have increased and become more frequent in recent years, researchers area focusing on how wildfires affect ecosystem resilience, which has serious implications for the recovery and protection of native forests and plantations. Most physicochemical and biological soil properties, including soil surface mineralogical composition, can be severely impacted by fires. However, no attempt has been made from a bibliometric point of view to provide a comprehensive picture of the research status on fire effects in mineralogy and nutrient stocks. Using the VOSviewer software, this study aims to evaluate fire effects on mineralogy and nutrients (FMN), the thematic evolution and determine the most relevant trends based on the intellectual structure of the knowledge built up in this research field. The methodology is divided into two stages: (i) Data Collection, and (ii) Bibliometric Analysis and Data Mining (Performance Analysis and Science Mapping). A detailed bibliometric analysis was performed on 530 Web of Science (WOS) articles indexes from1984 to 2020. Overall, the results show that Forest Ecology and Management is the leading journal in the field. The top three countries hosting core research centers for this topic are the United States, Spain, and France. Certini G. was the author with more citations (1395) in one paper and Johnson, D. had the most published papers (19) with a total of 549 citations. Currently, the hotspots of fire issues mainly include soil nutrients (e.g. nitrogen, phosphorus, carbon, and calcium); in addition to the selected keywords, wildfires co-occur more frequently with disturbances and terms such as soils, water quality, boreal forests, and stream. In conclusion, 530 articles written by 1822 authors and their research displayed in 211 journals from universities and research centers in 60 countries demonstrate the growing interest in the field.