Critical mineral trend analysis using text mining

Abstract

The supply of minerals is important to the world's major and emerging industrial economies. Over time, the supply of these minerals has been a concern to the US (United States) government. This led to Executive Order 13817 of 2017 which outline minerals that are critical to the US economy and national security. The US Geological Survey (USGS) executes the order to ensure a constant supply of critical minerals. Despite the US government and other state agencies' steps to define and review the critical mineral list yearly, there has not been any published list by academia on what they describe as critical minerals. The objectives of this study are to identify the trends in critical minerals using research publications and reveal the knowledge gap between academia and the government-published literature. Text mining will be used as a tool to achieve the set objectives in this publication. Thirty-one articles were obtained for this research which was sampled at random from publications from 2008 to 2020 using "Critical minerals" as the keyword. Our results show Helium and Iron Ore carried no supply risk, and unsurprisingly were not found in the research articles. Gold, however, also carried no risk, but still carried weight in the research discussions.