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In the American continent, the movement of tectonic plates causes seismic activity that generates earthquakes. Some countries of America are located on the western fringe of the Pacific Ring of Fire, which involves several tectonic plates, such as Nazca, Cocos, and North American, among others. This study aims to analyse the scientific production of Earthquakes in America (EiA) using Web of Science and Scopus databases, to understand the origin (first publications in the area), intellectual structure (bibliometric maps), and research trends (topics for future works). The methodology was based on: (i) criteria for database selection (reasons for selecting Scopus and Web of Science), (ii) data processing (merging databases, deleting duplicates or erroneous documents, and the selection of bibliometric software), and (iii) analysis of intellectual structure (performance of scientific publications using bibliometric maps). The EiA has greatly impacted academia since its first publication in 1861, analysing 6553 scientific publications from the western part of the Pacific Ring of Fire. It includes the most representative subduction zones in the world, with major records in the last nine years, having contributions mainly from Mexico, France, Guatemala, and Chile. Finally, the trend topics aligned to EiA are ground motion models, seismic hazards, and induced seismicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The continuous increase in the volume of geospatial data has led to the creation of storage tools and the cloud to process data. Google Earth Engine (GEE) is a cloud-based platform that facilitates geoprocessing, making it a tool of great interest to the academic and research world. This article proposes a bibliometric analysis of the GEE platform to analyze its scientific production. The methodology consists of four phases. The first phase corresponds to selecting "search" criteria, followed by the second phase focused on collecting data during the 2011 and 2022 periods using Elsevier's Scopus database. Software and bibliometrics allowed to review the published articles during the third phase. Finally, the results were analyzed and interpreted in the last phase. The research found 2800 documents that received contributions from 125 countries, with China and the USA leading as the countries with higher contributions supporting an increment in the use of GEE for the visualization and processing of geospatial data. The intellectual structure study and knowledge mapping showed that topics of interest included satellites, sensors, remote sensing, machine learning, land use and land cover. The co-citations analysis revealed the connection between the researchers who used the GEE platform in their research papers. GEE has proven to be an emergent web platform with the potential to manage big satellite data easily. Furthermore, GEE is considered a multidisciplinary tool with multiple applications in various areas of knowledge. This research adds to the current knowledge about the Google Earth Engine platform, analyzing its cognitive structure related to the research in the Scopus database. In addition, this study presents inferences and suggestions to develop future works with this methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Landslides, earthquakes, and other natural events can change the landscape and generate human and economic losses, affecting transportation and public service infrastructure. In every geotechnical project, the investigation phase plays a fundamental role in reducing the risk of occurrence and mitigating catastrophes. As a result, governments have created entities to study disasters and identify triggering factors that generate huge losses worldwide. This research aims to conduct a systematic review of the relationship between geotechnics and disasters through bibliometric techniques, scientific production evaluation, and case studies analysis to recognize key topics, methods, and thematic development of the research worldwide. The research methodology consisted of three steps: (1) Database analysis, selection, and combination, (2) bibliometric analysis, and (3) systematic review using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) method. The systematic review with bibliometric analysis collected data from 1973 to 2021, with 1299 academic publications indexed in the Scopus and WoS database. These results indicated a growing trend of annual publications on disasters and their relationship with geotechnical studies, highlighting current issues and technological innovation. The main research trends in disaster risk assessment were topics mainly linked to landslides, earthquakes, liquefaction, and inappropriate analysis models with applications of geophysical methods, laboratory tests, remote sensing, and numerical models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water supply is strategic for the development of society. The water distribution in nature follows patterns linked to geographic and territorial issues. Climate fluctuations aggravate shortage problems in semi-arid regions. This study aims to develop a systematic review of research on water scarcity in semi-arid areas through bibliometric methods that allow the analysis of its structure, performance, evolution, and future trends. The methodology considers three phases: (i) literature review, (ii) data cleaning and processing, and (iii) analysis of the research field and future trends. The intellectual structure of water scarcity in semi-arid zones covers 2206 documents with the collaboration of sixty-one countries, distributed in studies carried out in 54 years (1967 to 2021). This field of research has been growing, especially since the 21st century (93.1% of the documents). The countries that study the issue the most are those with high population rates and large consumption patterns, such as the United States and China. There are two central areas of interest led by the terms "water scarcity" and "water stress" due to the intensive use of the resource for agriculture and the management of the water–energy–climate nexus. Thus, the most significant journals studied relate remote sensing to resource management, and the most cited are related to agriculture. This research made it possible to consider future topics such as the study of anthropogenic effects and climate change, the accuracy and applicability of models, and future trends in conventional and unconventional agriculture and resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Floods can be caused by heavy rainfall and the consequent overflow of rivers, causing low-lying areas to be affected. Populated regions close to riverbeds are the sectors most affected by these disasters, which requires modelling studies to generate different scenarios. The work focuses on the bibliometric analysis of the search for topics such as flood modelling focused on the research, risk, and assessment of these catastrophes, aiming to determine new trends and tools for their application in the prevention of these natural disasters. The methodology consists of: (i) search criteria and database selection, (ii) pre-processing of the selected data and software, and (iii) analysis and interpretation of the results. The results show a wide range of studies for dimensional analysis in different flood scenarios, which greatly benefit the development of flood prevention and risk strategies. In addition, this work provides insight into the different types of software and modelling for flood analysis and simulation and the various trends and applications for future modelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change has influenced the demand for natural resources, such as water, energy, and food. This study aimed to analyse the relationship between the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) nexus and climate change through a review and analysis of scientific publications to discern trends towards sustainability. The methodology adopted in this study involved i) selection, processing, and merging of databases; ii) a bibliometric analysis; and iii) a systematic literature review using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses methods. The findings of this study reflect a strong relationship between the WEF nexus and sustainability influenced by climate change, which highlights the need to balance natural resource availability, growing population demand, and productive activities in a given territory. The bibliometric analysis performed in this study included interactions between the WEF nexus and climate change by considering 1,220 scientific publications from the Scopus and Web of Science databases that covered policy, sustainability, management, and governance aspects. Based on five keyword clusters of the WEF nexus, climate change, and sustainability, it also extracted the research directions from the systematic literature review of 104 documents. This study summarises the interest in the WEF nexus and highlights that the utilization and management of the natural resources of a region so as to balance the WEF nexus and climate change is among the most significant challenges of the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Society faces a significant problem in regards to the spread of harmful products in the environment, primarily caused by accelerated growth and resource consumption. Consequently, there is a need for materials to be processed in less harmful ways and to remedy the contaminated sources they generate. Microporous materials have been studied for a long time and are used in waste treatment alternatives. Natural zeolites, on which this study is based, are attractive to the scientific and technological communities, due to their numerous applications as decontaminants and adsorption properties. This study analyzes the intellectual structures of publications related to natural zeolites in environmental remediation, using bibliometric methods to determine their volumes and trends. The methodology comprises of an analysis based on 1582 articles, using VOSviewer software, with data from 1974 to 2020, via the Scopus database. Results reflect a notable increase in publications from the end of the 1990s; the greatest contribution in the area comes from Eurasian countries. The study considers that development in this line of research will continue to increase and serve as a great contribution to preserve the environment in coming years, with themes that focus on water treatment (e.g., drinking water, wastewater, greywater), removal of heavy metals, ammonium, ammonia, and construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The technical and scientific analysis regarding studies of the water surface or groundwater has increasingly taken on a great social impact, which has led to the creation of the term socio-hydrology. Since decision making has a greater weight, considering the social perspective, its study has become more important in the past 20 years. This article aims to carry out a bibliometric analysis related to socio-hydrology using the Scopus database and the application of VOSviewer software for the evaluation of the intellectual structure of socio-hydrology, its conceptual evolution, and its tendencies. The methodology considers (i) search criteria of the research field, (ii) search and document selection, (iii) software and data extraction, and (iv) analysis of results and trends. The results show us the term socio-hydrology as a new scientific discipline that has traces in the Scopus database in the past two decades. However, its application stems from recognising ancestral knowledge alongside other forms of knowledge. Socio-hydrology practice requires participatory models, where the community has a great influence, and for the most part, it guarantees results for the common good. The trend of this topic is growing and open to the criteria of sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the Digne Convention in 1991, the literature related to Geoparks has gained a growing interest on the academy's part, especially in achieving the preservation of geological interest sites through sustainable tourism. This article aims to provide an analysis of the academic research on Geoparks, based on publications in the Scopus database in the period 2002–2020. Bibliometric analysis methods and bibliographic display maps were examined using VOSviewer software. The bibliometric analysis process comprises three phases: (i) Search Criteria and Source Identification, (ii) software and data extraction, and (iii) data analysis and interpretation. The results show geoparks in full growth as a scientific discipline, thanks to the contribution of various authors, institutions, journals, and related topics that confirm the importance of this field of study. Additionally, bibliometric maps lead to an understanding of the intellectual structure of the subject, in which keyword co-occurrence analysis shows six main themes, ranging from 'UNESCO Global Geoparks' to 'Geo-tourism-Sustainable Tourism'. this, combined with maps of co-citation, broadly exhibits this structure and development, showing areas of current interest and potential development, thus offering the latest knowledge on Geopark research worldwide. There is a growing concentration of research on geomorphological heritage and geo-tourism, focusing on methodologies to evaluate the specialities of this type of heritage and define the concept of geo-tourism; there is a great interest especially in the evaluation and identification of geo-site/geo-morphosites which try to eliminate subjectivity in methods and focus on sustainable development of the localities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rockfall is one of the main phenomena in mountainous environments due to its fast and high speed of movement, its unpredictability, and, therefore, the difficulty of identifying signs of instability and detachment of the blocks. Compared to other types of sliding, the proportion of rockfall research is smaller and sometimes little known, but, in the last five years, rapid growth in this area has been shown. Therefore, this research aimed to review the intellectual structure of rockfall, through analysis of scientific production using bibliometric techniques that allow its analysis, knowledge, global evolution, and future trends in rockfall. The research methodology consists of three steps: (1) data compilation, (2) software and data cleaning, and (3) analysis, interpretation, and visualization. This analysis focuses on the period from 1975 to 2019. For the data, a total of 811 academic publications were retrieved from the Scopus database. The results indicate an increasing trend of annual publications on rockfall. This analysis reveals the main topics, countries, and most influential institutions in the world that have carried out relevant research in scientific publications; it also shows the journals that have the most publications. VOSviewer software was adopted to evaluate the co-occurrence of author keywords. Currently, the hotspots rockfall issues mainly include: hazard-risk assessment, remote sensing, and rockfall monitoring. Finally, this article analyzes the limitations of current research and proposes a future direction for the development of new research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geodiversity has elements of exceptional scientific value that are considered to represent geoheritage, or geological heritage. One way to conserve and promote the knowledge of these elements is through the initiatives of United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Global Geoparks, which, over a decade ago, began to notably highlight a new sustainable tourism alternative called geotourism, or geological tourism, that promotes the protection of the unique geological resources of territory and, at the same time, provides social, economic, and environmental benefits. This study aims to investigate the scientific information related to geotourism in the Scopus database through a bibliometric analysis, using the VOSviewer software, for the evaluation of the structure, conceptual evolution, and trends of geotourism following related publications. The research comprises four study phases: (i) search criteria of the research field; (ii) search and selection of documents; (iii) software and data extraction; and (iv) analysis of results and trends. The results present geotourism as a scientific discipline that is in a phase of exponential research growth and exhibits its scientific productivity from 1984 to 2019, where three main periods are differentiated: introduction, theoretical development, and diversification of information. The most active research area is geomorphological heritage, which is very far from the emerging line of research of engineering geology in geotourism. However, growing exploration during the last six years has generated the development of various geoscientific branches promoted by geotourism that, currently, present their research area trends such as geosites, geoheritages, and geoparks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]