Identifying Research Gaps and Directions from Published Literature: A Bibliometric and Thematic Synthesis of Utah Lake and Great Salt Lake Research

Utah Lake and Great Salt Lake share a watershed yet face distinct pressures: eutrophication, harmful algal blooms, hydrologic decline, and exposed-playa dust hazards, but their combined literature has never been systematically characterized. I analyzed 1383 peer-reviewed records using bibliographic coupling, Louvain community detection, latent Dirichlet allocation, and large language model-assisted annotation. The coupling network (1012 records, 7536 edges) split into 379 communities (Q=0.541), of which 342 were singletons and only 14 reached 10 or more papers, together holding 59% of coupled records. Of 10 main-text clusters, 6 are anchored in a lake and 4 in a topic rather than a system; just 1 is Utah Lake dominant. Great Salt Lake research spans broader disciplinary communities (brine-shrimp ecology, mercury cycling, dust and paleoclimate); Utah Lake research is more applied (native-species management, eutrophication, harmful algal blooms). Recent Utah Lake studies report no lake-wide chlorophyll-a trend across 1068 Landsat scenes (1984–2021) and dissolved phosphorus near ∼0.02–0.04 mg L−1 over ∼50 years despite ∼300% population growth, implying internal sediment cycling dominates; recent Great Salt Lake work centers on hydrologic decline and playa dust hazards. The synthesis identifies five cross-cutting gaps, including dust-emission-to-exposure assessment, Utah Lake nutrient modeling, and predictive water management, and yields a reproducible, transferable framework.