A comprehensive bibliometric overview: antibiotic resistance and Escherichia coli in natural water

The environment is the most important reservoir for both resistance mechanisms and gene transfer in biological science studies. This study gives a bibliometric overview of studies of “antibiotic resistance” and “Escherichia coli” in the field of “Agricultural and Biological Sciences” from 2015 to 2019 to assess both research trends and scholarly networks in diverse research disciplines. The two keywords of “antibiotic resistance” and “Escherichia coli” were selected to search in the Scopus database. Each review article was categorized into materials, natural waters (i.e., seawater, freshwater) and wastewater, journal name, and quartile in category of the journal, the year of publication, and the country. Bibliometric indicators and visualization maps were utilized to analyse the retrieved data quantitatively and qualitatively. A total of 1376 publications in the field of agricultural and biological sciences over the last 5 years were obtained using the keywords of antibiotic resistance and Escherichia coli. With additional keywords of freshwater and wastewater, 4 and 24 studies were obtained, respectively. Wastewater was found to be the most common working environment for the keywords of antibiotic resistance and Escherichia coli. It is also found that the studies of antibiotic resistance are mainly conducted in wastewater environments, focusing on human and food health. Working under “One Health” consisting of human, animal and agriculture, and environmental health could be the only permanent and effective approach to solving antibiotic resistance-related issues. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11356-021-14084-1.