Air conditioning research evolution from 2008 to 2019: A scientometric analysis

Abstract

Air conditioning is an essential topic in heat transfer phenomena because it is widely applied in homes and industries. It has an incredible amount of applications ranging from health care to food shelf life. With the enhancement of technology, it is necessary to create new devices that increase the efficiency of air conditioning. Hence, it is required to evaluate the trend of study of this topic to help researchers to get the best research direction that promotes the acquisition of better experimental results. For that reason, it was collected a total of 2431 documents about air conditioning from the Science Citation Index Expanded during the period from 2008 to 2019. Next, it was used HistCite to analyze the yearly output, country, institution, citation impact, and citation relationships in this field of study. Results suggest that the research of air conditioning had an increase during the studied 11-year period. The countries with the highest research output were China, The USA, and Japan, and the institutions with the highest research output were the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Hong Kong Polytech University. The journals with the largest number of articles were Energy and Buildings with 195 publications and Applied Thermal engineering with 164 papers.