A Bibliometric Analysis of Research on Supported Ionic Liquid Membranes during the 1995–2015 Period: Study of the Main Applications and Trending Topics

A bibliometric analysis based on Scopus database was performed to identify the global research trends related to Supported Ionic Liquid Membranes (SILMs) during the time period from 1995 to 2015. This work tries to improve the understanding of the most relevant research topics and applications. The results from the analysis reveal that only after 2005 the research efforts focused on SILMs became significant, since the references found before that year are scarce. The most important research works on the four main application groups for SILMs defined in this work (carbon dioxide separation, other gas phase separations, pervaporation and liquid phase separations) were summarized in this paper. Carbon dioxide separation appeared as the application that has received by far the most attention according to the research trends during the analysed period. Comments about other significant applications that are gaining attention, such as the employment of SILMs in analytical tasks or their consideration for the production of fuel cells, have been included.