A Bibliometric Analysis of Fluorite Resource Utilization Technology: Global and Chinese Development in the Past 25 Years

Due to the rise in emerging strategic industries and the widespread application of new and improved technology, the global demand for strategic mineral resources has rapidly increased. Among these, fluorite is one of the most crucial strategic mineral resources in the world. However, so far, there are few comprehensive reviews of the progress in technology supporting the utilization of fluorite resources. In this work, the Bibliometrix package (version 4.5.0), VOSviewer (version 1.6.20), CiteSpace (version 6.4.R1), and the Web of Science Core Collection database were employed, and 2472 publications related to fluorite resource utilization technology (published from 1999 to 2024) were studied via a detailed analysis of the following four aspects: 1. the characteristics of the publications; 2. journal distribution, co-cited journals, and co-cited references; 3. active countries, institutions, and authors; and 4. popular research topics, including theme evolution, keyword co-occurance, and keyword burst analysis. In this work, an outline of the research and progress in fluorite resource utilization technology over the past 25 years is presented, which supports systematic evaluations of the trends in science and technology in related fields and contributes to the development of technology enabling the utilization of fluorite resources.