Research status of shale gas: A review

The shale gas revolution has resulted in a sharp growth in the number of researchers and collaborative work in this area, particularly during the past few decades. This study aims to provide unprecedented and invaluable shale gas information to businesses, policymakers, and any part of society involved in shale gas development. Using bibliometric and collaboration techniques, our study focuses (on an individual level) on the development trends in shale gas research. We examine the most influential authors and explore the characteristics and implications of collaboration networks and patterns in shale gas literature between 1990 and 2014. Much of our information was obtained from the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) database. Author collaboration analysis software that has been independently developed was used to further explain core author contributions and trends, as well as collaboration networks. We primarily focus on three research areas: (1) the quantity and growth trend of the number of authors exploring shale gas, (2) author productivity distribution, and (3) an analysis of author collaboration networks. First, our results reveal three developmental stages. The period from 1990 to 2008 was the early stage and characterized by steady development. The years between 2008 and 2013 witnessed rapid growth, before that growth slowed notably after 2013. The annual growth rate of the number of new authors was determined to be approximately 980%. This finding also indicates that shale gas is becoming a fast-developing and popular research topic. Furthermore, Horsfield B from the German Research Centre for Geosciences has been the dominant contributor to date, followed by Krooss BM and Ballice L. The top 15 authors are mainly from Germany, the USA, Canada, Estonia, Jordan, and China. Our collaboration network and pattern analysis reveals that the two biggest clusters of cooperation are comprised of Horsfield B and Ballice L. We also discovered that most authors have a specific collaboration, such as that between Williams PT and Jaber JO, both of whom are from the Al-Ahliyya Amman University.