Water Ecological Environment Protection under Changing Environment: A Systematic Review and Bibliometric Analysis

Systematic review is usually used to reveal the change characteristics of the quantity and law of the citations focus on one research theme. The paper investigated the research status, development trend and hotspots of water ecological environment protection using bibliometric analysis. Based on bibliometric, mathematics and statistics, articles related to the water ecological environment protection in Web of Science for the period of 2008-2019 were selected. CiteSpace software was used to conduct the annual frequency analysis of papers, countries and research institutions analysis, co-occurring keywords analysis, clustering analysis and research frontier. Results show that: (1) The number of published papers and cited papers have increased for the past 12 years. Especially, the number of published papers has increased sharply since 2015, indicating that the research on water ecological environment protection has been transferred from the exploration stage to rapid development stage, which needs to be analyzed from the aspects of national policy. (2) China has more publications than other countries. The research institutions are mainly concentrated on universities, the cooperation among them is not close. It shows the characteristics of small distribution and large concentration. Keywords such as model and water quality are research hotspots. (3) The results of clustering analysis show that water ecological environment quality assessment, water and soil conservation, ecosystem services and aquatic ecosystem are four main research directions of water ecological environment protection. (4) Using method of burst detection, nine keywords are obtained, which indicate that water ecological environment protection has rich research perspectives. The burst strength of land use is high, it will become the research hotspot of water ecological environment protection in future. The results should be beneficial to systematically understand research progress and future trends of water ecologic environment under changing environment, and therefore it promotes ecological civilization construction.