A Scientometric Review of Global Research on the Sustainability of Paraffin Oil

Abstract

Paraffin oil is a blend of a mineral source of higher alkanes, like oil. The world health organization classifies unrefined or mildly treated mineral oils as Group 3 carcinogens, leading to skin cancer in humans. This study aimed to conduct a detailed scientific analysis of the WoS paraffin oil research papers. We collected data using the web of science with the keywords "paraffin oil" using four databases. A total of 4613 articles were found, of which 89.8% were original articles. We can observe that the author of LIU WM publishes the most articles (39). The highest source is occupied by Energy & Fuels (h index 38, g index 56, m index 1.226, TC: 4502, NP: 183). China was the leading country (982) publications, followed by multi-country publications (90), highest total citations (16583), and at the same time, the Netherlands had produced average article citations (39.53%). Paraffin oil was published in 2019 in 301 papers at its peak. Our study was the first scientific analysis in this field, to our best knowledge, and we believe that paraffin oil research papers require multicentre studies and further research from developing and least-developed nations.