Microbial carbon capture - evolving trends, interconnections, and recent spotlights of the past three decades

Greenhouse effects intensification has drawn increased interests in carbon capture with a fast-growing number of publications in this field. In this research, the automated keyword extraction, natural language processing, and data visualization techniques have been employed to conduct the first in-depth analysis of the keywords in publications in the field of carbon capture with a particular emphasis on microbial carbon capture. The keywords in 65,509 research articles and reviews from the Web of Science^TM Core Collection spanning over the past three decades (1992–2022) were examined. Through keyword analysis, it was found that “microbial carbon capture and storage” was the most concentrated sub-domain of this research field. Furthermore, the keywords of 11,430 publications within this sub-domain were dwelled for the same period. By examining the keyword occurrences and temporal trends, three categories of keywords were identified such as (a) established trending-up keywords, (b) emerging trending-up keywords, and (c) trending-down keywords. Based on the most established and emerging trending-up keywords from this sub-domain in the past 5–15 years, including “biochar”, “biofuel”, “nitrogen addition”, “microbial necromass”, and “rhizosphere microbiome”, a brief literature review on research topics represented by these keywords and their co-occurring keywords were identified. Additionally, it was noticed that high occurrences of method-related keywords in publications within this sub-domain, with the most prominent ones being “gene sequencing”, “stable carbon isotopes”, and “meta-analysis”. It is suggested that researchers in this subfield may pay more attention to the application of these research methods in studies related to microbial carbon capture.