A pre-assessment of past research on the topic of environmental-friendly electronics

Environmental-friendly products, processes, tools, methods and etc… have been under the interest of both industry and academy. However, this interest has not been analyzed systematically for the academic studies. On the other hand, bibliometric analyses have been a widely used approach to measure and to analyze the interest of academic world on a certain topic. In this regard, this study intends to provide insight about the research on environmental-friendly electronic using the related literatures from the Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge database during the period of 1980-2016. This study consists of two parts. In the first part, 7288 academic papers having the “environmental” and “electronic” phrases on “Title”, “” or “Keywords” were retrieved and analyzed using bibliometric analysis methodology. These two adjectives has been selected on purpose since current studies on textual analysis indicate that phrase building most frequently starts after adjectives. In the second part of this work, Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) method, concept extraction and k-means clustering method was performed to gain more insight about the textual structure of the retrieved articles. Findings indicate that, approximately one third of publications were written by the authors addressing USA. It is also clarified that the topic was not in the agenda of researchers between 1980 and 1990. The number of publications on the area had significantly increased and had reached its peak in 2014. Text mining results showed that, the most important research focus was on “life-cycle” that was followed by “e-waste, sensor, recycling and solder” respectively.