A meta-analysis of the scientific literature on (photo) Fenton and persulfate advanced oxidation processes: Where do we stand and where are we heading to?

Resumen

In this article, through a natural language processing model and a bibliometric study, a meta-analysis of the scientific production of the 21st century on Fenton and persulfate activation processes is performed. We present the rapidly changing landscape of these processes' know-how over the last years, and we identify the recent topics of interest. First, we queried Elsevier's Scopus data set of articles and patents, and then we used the text-mined author/Scopus keywords to model the respective fields through latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling. The evolution of the topics addressed by Review Papers was used to identify the milestones of each treatment process, and the article-to-patent ratio as a metric of the technology maturity. Overall, our approach indicates that the critical mass of the know-how has been achieved, and following the identification of the critical environmental issues, a significant part of the studies must be become real applications of advanced oxidation processes (AOPs).