Potential implications of gold-mining activities on some environmental components: A global assessment (1990 to 2018)

Abstract

This study analysed 115 Gold Mining Impact (GMIs) research articles published in Web of Science (WOS) with the highest total lifetime citations and citations per year by summarising the trends, search terms, keywords, most productive authors and their countries based on the area of investigation. To assess the studies that have been undertaken on GMIs, we used “Gold Mining Impacts” as the search term for the studies published from 1990 to 2018 using bibliometric innovative techniques. The results revealed an annual growth rate of about 11.3% which connotes that research on GMIs has been increasing over time during the period of study. However, the research output on GMIs fluctuated during the survey period, peaking in 2018 accounting for 14.95% (13/115) of the total, followed by 2015 with 10 research articles (11.5%) during the same period. Findings from this study also revealed the top 20 most productive countries with USA (21, 24.15%), South Africa (12, 13.8%) and Canada (8, 9.2%) ranking first, second and third respectively. Most studies on GMIs were from developed nations, while a few came from developing countries. The United States of America and South Africa had the highest research articles published on GMIs despite their ranking in gold production.

Keywords

• Environmental components
• Gold mining
• Impacts
• Scientometric