Identifying Indicators of Progress in Thermal Spray Research Using Bibliometrics Analysis

We investigated the research publications on thermal spray in the period of 1985-2015 using the data from Web of Science, Scopus and SciVal^®. Bibliometrics analysis was employed to elucidate the country and institution distribution in various thermal spray research areas and to characterize the trends of topic change and technology progress. Results show that China, USA, Japan, Germany, India and France were the top countries in thermal spray research, and Xi’an Jiaotong University, Universite de Technologie Belfort–Montbeliard, Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, ETH Zurich, National Research Council of Canada, University of Limoges were among the top institutions that had high scholarly research output during 2005-2015. The terms of the titles, keywords and abstracts of the publications were analyzed by the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model and visually mapped using the VOSviewer software to reveal the progress of thermal spray technology. It is found that thermal barrier coating was consistently the main research area in thermal spray, and high-velocity oxy-fuel spray and cold spray developed rapidly in the last 10 years.