An Empirical Study on the Landscape of Mining and Mineral Processing (MMP) With Big Data

Over the last two decades, mining and mineral processing (MMP) has changed dramatically. Little is known about the bibliometric analysis of MMP. To this end, this study used the big data analysis to investigate the quantity and quality of scientific outputs in MMP over the past 21-year timespan. This study used IBM SPSS Statistics 25.0 and VOSviewer software to research on the 20 journals from Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-Expanded) of Web of Science Core Collection (WOSCC). VOSviewer software was used to identify the visualization contributions of scientific outputs over 21-year timespan. Totally, the big data analysis shows people of China have the highest cumulative IFs, but their mean IFs are relatively low and are ranked in fourth place. Visually, people of Chin ranked the first in total link strength (2967), but not in links (86), which is the third place among Top15 countries. From the perspective of quality, it cannot rank the first. Thus, people of China should put more effort into improving the quality of scientific outputs.