Research Trends in Nuclear Waste Management: A Global Perspective

The present study attempts to highlight quantitatively the growth and development of world literature on nuclear waste management in terms of publication output as per international nuclear information system (INIS) database. During 1970-2009, a total of 44529 publications were published by the scientists in the field of nuclear waste management. The average number of publications published per year was 1113. The highest number of publications (2795) were published in 2001. The spurt in the literature output was reported during 1991.2007. There were 140 countries involved in research in this field. The USA topped the list with 6672 (14.98 %) publications followed by Japan with 2859 (6.42 %) publications and France with 2612 (5.87 %). Authorship and collaboration trend was towards multi-authored as more than 56 per cent of the publications were collaborative in nature. An intensive collaboration was found during 2000.2004. Maximum publications were from the domains, nuclear fuel processing and waste management aspect with 29159 publications followed by nuclear installations/reactors with 4188 publications and chemical analysis with 2452 publications. Japan Atomic Energy Agency (Japan) topped the list with 677 publications followed by Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (India) with 533 publications. The most preferred journals by the scientists were: Transactions of the American Nuclear Society with 528 publications, Atw Internationale Zeitschrift fuer Kernenergie with 244 publications, AIP Conference Proceedings with 238 publications. English was the most predominant language (79.56 %) used by the scientists for communication.