A systematic analysis of research trends on the utilization of life cycle assessment in pharmaceutical applications

Pharmaceutical manufacturing on a large scale and the presence of pharmaceuticals in the environment have sparked growing concern. The life cycle assessment (LCA) technique is an efficient tool for analyzing any potential environmental impacts associated with pharmaceuticals at each step of their life cycle. This study presents research trends and future directions of pharma-LCAs through bibliometric indicators. The Scopus database was used to collect the literature dataset. Between 2000 and 2022, a total of 207 documents involving "pharmaceutical" and "LCA" were released. Numerous aspects of these documents, including subject categories, journals, articles, countries, affiliations, funding sponsors, authors, and keywords, have been systematically examined in this research. Collaborations between authors and countries were visualized and analyzed by using social network analysis based on co-authorship relations. Additionally, keywords were clustered using co-occurrence relations to discover the most trending topics in the literature review. The research showed that as an evolutionary process, the utilization of the life cycle assessment method has continued to increase in the pharmaceutical sector within the period. As well, the principal focus of studies has been on pharmaceuticals for human consumption. The analysis of extracted keywords reveals that green chemistry, energy efficiency, and sustainable pharmacy have always been the main topics. However, in recent years, researchers' focus has shifted to environmental impacts, carbon footprint, wastewater treatment, human toxicity, active pharmaceutical ingredients and blisters.{GRAPHIACAL ABSTRACT}