A bibliometric study on the research trends and hotspots of proton exchange membrane electrolyzer

The application of hydrogen energy produced by proton exchange membrane electrolyzer (PEMEC) is conducive to the solution of the greenhouse effect and the energy crisis. In order to understand the development trends and research hotspot of PEMEC in recent years, a total of 1874 research articles related to this field from 2003 to 2023 were obtained from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS CC) database. The visualization software VOSviewer is used for bibliometric analysis, and the research progress, hotspots and trends in the PEMEC field are summarized. It was found that in the past two decades, literature in the PEMEC field has shown a trend of stable increase at first and then rapidly increasing. And it is in a stage of rapid growth after 2021. Renewable Energy previously published research articles related to PEMEC, with the highest frequency of citations. There are a total of 6128 researchers in this field, but core authors only account for 4.5 % of the total. Although China entered this field later than the United States and Canada, it has the largest number of research articles. The research results provide a comprehensive overview of various aspects in the PEMEC field, which is beneficial for researchers to grasp the development hotspots of PEMEC.