Scientometric Review of Trends on the Mechanical Properties of Additive Manufacturing and 3D Printing

Nowadays, the challenges of the industry increasingly demand the manufacture of complex shapes with great design flexibility without waste by 3D printing. Additive manufacturing, unlike traditional manufacturing techniques such as casting and machining, enables designers to rapid prototype while lowering operating costs and material waste during this process. In this way, understanding the current state of the literature related to additive manufacturing processes and the mechanical properties of 3D printed materials is of high importance to determine a research horizon in developing future works of this topic. In this paper, a bibliometric analysis, also named Scientometric science, was implemented. The tendencies and transcendental topics were determined using the Bibliometrix package for R and VOSviewer. Data were exported directly from the Scopus database with a search equation. The results showed that, of the 1271 documents analyzed, 2015 is a year where the research began its developing stage, with a growth rate of 20.8%. The USA resulted to be a leading country in publications followed by China and the UK. Likewise, it is observed that the author with the highest number of publications and h-index is C.B. Williams, followed by A.A. Zadpoor and J. Muller. Besides, the evolution in time of the keywords most used by researchers, and trends and research gaps in the study of additive manufacturing with the mechanical properties of the 3D printing materials are presented.