Research progress and industry development status of irradiation sterilization based on bibliometrics

Based on bibliometrics and VOSviewer 1.6.20 software, metrological statistics and visual analysis of 141 Chinese and 1 337 English documents on radiation sterilization in the field of food science in China Knowledge Network (CNKI) and Web of Science (WOS) databases from 1990-2023 were carried out, and the status of irradiation sterilization patent applications and the development status of enterprises were analyzed by means of the patent search tool SooPAT and commercial search platform Tianyecha. The results showed that the number of published articles in the field of radiation sterilization had been increasing year by year since 2000, and the United States, China, and the United Kingdom were the main issuing countries. The Journal of Nuclear Agricultural Sciences and Journal of Nuclear Agriculture and Applied and Environmental Microbiology had more published articles, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China was the most supportive fund project. The Chinese core authors ZHU J T, FENG M and LIU C Q were closely connected with each other, and the author with the most publications in WOS database was THAYER D W. The co-occurrence analysis of keywords found that irradiation dosage and the application of radiation sterilization were the research hotspots. The number of applications and invention patents in the field of radiation sterilisation were 1 997 and 1 367 respectively. At present, there are 23 radiation sterilisation related companies existing in China.