Hotspots and trends of sphalerite flotation: Bibliometric analysis

Flotation is the most important method for recovering sphalerite, and it has attracted significant research attention worldwide. In this study to clarify the hotspots for phased research frontiers and research progress of sphalerite flotation technology in the last 20 years, 720 pieces of relevant academic literature were selected by using "flotation" and "sphalerite, marmatite, and zinc sulfide" as keywords from the web of science database. The authors, institutions, and literature keywords were clustered by the visualization software VOSviewer and CiteSpace. The results show that, the number of papers published on sphalerite flotation has increased signifi-cantly since 2008, and China has made important contributions, various fund and zinc resource reserves have an important impact on sphalerite research. Universities are the main body of sphalerite research, and most of the foreign countries have independent research groups with little exchange and cooperation, whereas Chinese universities have more cooperation and many representative research teams. This paper systematically expounds on the research hotspots in this field, including the improvement of flotation separation technology, the progress of research methods, and the progress of reagents, provides a comprehensive overview for the future flotation research of sphalerite, and determines the further research fields.