The State of the Art Bacterial Nanocellulose: A Scientometric Analysis

Abstract Bacterial nanocellulose (BNC) is a versatile biopolymer with wide-ranging applications in various areas and is responsible for a global market turnover of around US$95 million, with an expected increase to US$3.5 billion by 2026. In view of the relevance and emergence of the subject, there is a need for a systematic analysis of the current state of the art of BNC. The aim of this study is therefore to carry out the first scientometric analysis of bacterial nanocellulose between 2006 and 2024. The study was based on data obtained from the Web of Science (WoS) Main Collection in March 2024, using Topic Search (TS) = bacterial nanocellulose. A total of 1796 documents were obtained, which were refined to 959 documents and analyzed using CiteSpace (5.8.R3) and Excel (2016). As a result of this analysis, the following were obtained: English as the predominant language; the article being the most used type of document; the history of citations and publications steadily increasing from 2013 to 2024. It was possible to correlate the number of publications with investment in nanotechnology, with China and the United States being the countries responsible for the largest number of publications. It was also possible to identify the main trends in the area using keyword analysis. Therefore, with the scientometric analysis carried out, the main influences impacting on the state of the art of bacterial nanocellulose could be verified.