Errors and inconsistencies in scientific reporting of aqueous phase adsorption of contaminants: A bibliometric study

The errors and misconceptions associated with the published works on the removal of noxious waste from water based solutions, is a worrisome situation in relation to the potential propagation of the errors and misconceptions through citations. The insights provided are to eliminate this weakness and sustain adsorption processes as cleaner option for the remediation of contaminated matrixes. This study reviewed the errors, and elaborated the rectification of the observed inconsistencies. The use of VOSviewer 1.6.13 enabled the bibliometric analysis of the errors and misconceptions, using articles retrieved from Scopus and Web of Science. The results revealed that, the errors and misconceptions in the adsorption studies were largely associated with the inaccuracies in the approaches deployed to linearizing the models for adsorption. The wrong approaches yielded many incorrect adsorption model equations as reviewed in this study. This study reports the original (nonlinear) adsorption models, and corrects the expressions of the linearized forms of the isotherm models and adsorption kinetics. The bibliometric output displayed maps of clear visualizations of the existing connections of network data on the 100 articles retrieved from 1988 to 2022. Authors, institutional affiliations, journals, and countries were the factors that provide information on the quality and influence of the publications, using indicators such as the number of articles, total citations, subject area, and H-index. The findings indicate significant increase in the number of publications since 1988. China was the leading country in terms of publications related to inconsistencies in adsorption reports. From the bibliometric results, 50.0% of the publications were erratum while original research articles and letters to editor represent 23.0 and 12.0% respectively. Only 6.0% of the publications were review articles. The distribution of the retrieved documents according to institutional affiliation indicates that the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology with nine publications had the highest number of articles. The distribution of the articles by country/territory follow the trend China > Taiwan ≈ Iran > others. The co-authors that published collaborative research work on mistakes and inconsistencies regarding adsorption of contaminants from solution are from France, United States, Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Iran. There are four distinct clusters of co-authors representing the different issues discussed in the articles. Out of 2332, terms that occurred in the titles and abstracts of articles retrieved from the Scopus database, 509 terms occurred in the various titles retrieved. The network visualizations of the terms that occur in the abstracts show that the main themes of the various abstracts include the misconception that is associated with the conceptual approach to the adsorption system, with a highlight on the pseudo first order kinetic equation.