Research trends in nanofluid and its applications: a bibliometric analysis.

This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of nanofluid research for the first time. Data of publications on nanofluid research were sourced from the Scopus® database spanning 1998 to 2020 using the query "nanofluid* or nanosuspension" in the title, abstract, and keyword dialogue box. This is followed by filtering the search in terms of document type, source type, language, and relevance. The co-authorship of organizations and countries, citation of publication and source, and co-occurrence of author keyword analyses were carried out using VOSviewer®. A total of 15,729 research papers (journals) were published during the period studied with an average publication of 684 papers per year. The analyses of the co-authorship of countries and organizations revealed that Iran (3234) and Quaid-I-Azam University in Pakistan (235) published the highest number of papers, respectively. For the analyses of citation of document and source, the highest citations were recorded by the paper of Buongiorno J. (3549) published in 2006 and the International Journal of Heat and Mass (56,175), respectively. Additionally, the co-occurrence of keyword analysis showed that the term "nanofluid" followed by "heat transfer" was the most used author keyword. This study revealed that heat transfer and flow applications of nanofluid were the most researched owing to the number of scientific papers produced by authors and organizations in the engineering field and heat transfer dedicated journals. Future nanofluid research should focus on ionic and bio-based fluids, hybrid and green-sourced nanoparticles, bioconvection, electrohydrodynamic, and peristaltic flow with special attention to medicine, pharmaceutical, and veterinary application of nanofluids. Finally, funding of nanofluid research needs to be improved across countries and institutions, with China leading the pack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]