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Mapping the field of microbial fuel cell: A quantitative literature review

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 Energy Reports 7 (2021) 4126–4138

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Energy Reports
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/egyr

Research paper

Mapping the field of microbial fuel cell: A quantitative literature

review (1970–2020)
Muhammad Nihal Naseer a , Asad A. Zaidi a , Hamdullah Khan a , Sagar Kumar a ,
∗
Muhammad Taha bin Owais a , Juhana Jaafar b , , Nuor Sariyan Suhaimin b ,
Yasmin Abdul Wahab , Kingshuk Dutta , Muhammad Asif a , S.F. Wan Muhamad Hatta e ,
c d

Muhammad Uzair f
a
National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), 44000-Islamabad, Pakistan
b
Advanced Membrane Technology Research Centre, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310-Johor, Malaysia
c
Nanotechnology & Catalysis Research Centre, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
d
Advanced Polymer Design and Development Research Laboratory (APDDRL), School for Advanced Research in Petrochemicals (SARP), Central
Institute of Petrochemicals Engineering and Technology (CIPET), Bengaluru - 562149, Karnataka, India
e
Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
f
Department of Mechanical Engineering, NED University of Engineering and Technology, 75270-Karachi, Pakistan

article info a b s t r a c t

Article history: Microbial fuel cell (MFC) has received much attention in the last decade as a promising technology to
Received 26 March 2021 simultaneously generate electricity and decontaminate wastewater. This study aims to quantitatively
Received in revised form 21 June 2021 review the published literature on MFC, published in the period of 1970–2020, based on the Web of
Accepted 25 June 2021
Science (WoS) database. For the first time in literature, a comprehensive quantitative review of MFC
Available online xxxx
has been conducted by employing the technique of bibliometric and content analyses. A total of 11,397
Keywords: publications have been retrieved from WoS, out of which 81.6% are research articles. The evaluation
Microbial fuel cell in the field of MFC has been mapped in various categories, such as publication history, publication
Research trend distribution, subject category distribution, leading journals, leading countries and leading organizations
Global attention in MFC research. Additionally, content analysis has been conducted to unearth the research trends
Research topics
in MFC; and some hot research topics in MFC have been spotted. Results depict that the period
Bibliometric analysis
2011–2020 has been the most appreciating era for MFC research, as it contributed 87% of the total
Quantitative review
publications. Among the subject categories, energy fuel and microbiology lead with contributions of
26.5% for each, but the overall growth of the energy fuel category in the last decade has been the
highest. Out of 1,147 journals publishing MFC research, Bioresource Technology is the leading one;
and countries like China, USA and India are the main hub of MFC research with 26.47%, 16.95% and
7.69% contributions in publications, respectively. The hottest topics in MFC research are nanoparticles,
catalysts, air electrodes, graphene electrodes, power enhancement, air cathode and nitrogen removal.
Moreover, major research areas are engineering, energy fuels and biotechnology with each contribution
26.5% of the total publications.
© 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND
license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

1. Introduction 80%–85% of the global energy production market (Liu, 2015).

According to recent research, our planet has entered a new era
The growing population of the world and an ever-increasing called the Anthropocene era (Stern et al., 2016; Crutzen, 2006;
quest for industrialization have made global water access and Lewis and Maslin, 2015; Ruddiman, 2013; Keys et al., 2019;
energy demand the preferential topics of discussion (Stern et al., Wagner, 2020). Anthropocene refers to changes in the earth’s
2016; Kober et al., 2020). The population is increasing at an environment, ecosystem and lifecycle due to the anthropogenic
enormously high rate and is anticipated to increase by 21% by activities of humans. Several anthropogenic activities are respon-
2040 (Kober et al., 2020). In order to meet this growing energy sible for Anthropocene, but according to many studies fossil fuel
demand, fossil fuels are a major contributor that dominates about burning and accompanied release of CO2 are the main contribu-
tors (Stern et al., 2016; Ruddiman, 2013; Council, 2011; Change,
∗ Corresponding author. 2013). Therefore, to ensure a sustainable future, clean and green
E-mail address: [email protected] (J. Jaafar). energy sources are required.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egyr.2021.06.082
2352-4847/© 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
nc-nd/4.0/).
M.N. Naseer, A.A. Zaidi, H. Khan et al. Energy Reports 7 (2021) 4126–4138

Another eminent issue faced globally is water scarcity. With treatment cell and microbial metal extraction cell (Huang et al.,
increasing population, global water demand is increasing but 2019). Moreover, certain products of MFC, such as extracted met-
resources are depleting at a higher pace. In the next decade, als, have found multiple applications, like in capacitors and MOS-
freshwater availability may decrease by 40% (Gupta et al., 2020). FETs (Metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor) (Wahab
In this regard, waste treatment has obtained much attention. But et al., 2020a,b; Abdul Wahab et al., 2020).
existing waste treatment technologies require a lot of energy and It has been realized that the published literature contains very
also lack the work–energy ratio for effluents discharge (Gupta few quantitative studies that dealt with the mapping of the MFC
et al., 2020; Siddiqi et al., 2018). Since organic waste serves as evolution. The most recent study was done by Ji et al. (2020),
a viable source of energy (Zaidi et al., 2018; Siddiqi et al., 2019; and it was the first study that quantitatively measured the aspect
Mushtaq et al., 2016; Siddiqi et al., 2020), wastewater (that con- of constructed wetland MFC. This study involved conduction of
tains organic wastes) can be seen as a renewable source of energy a bibliometric analysis on the constructed wetland MFC, using
that has minimal detrimental impacts on the environment (Gupta the Web of Science (WoS) database for the years of 2008–2020.
et al., 2020; Cai et al., 2019). In this regard, microbial fuel cell Another recent study has been performed by Zhao et al. (2020).
(MFC) has emerged as a promising technology. In nutshell, MFC In this study, content analysis and bibliometric techniques have
can be touted as a single solution catering to two eminent global been applied to quantitatively map microbial electrolysis cells for
issues, renewable energy production and fulfillment of water hydrogen production, using the WoS database, covering the pe-
demand. riod of 2008–2020. The first comprehensive quantitative analysis
Microbial fuel cell is a bio-electrochemical cell that generates of MFC was done by Khudzari et al. (2018), whereby the Scopus
electricity by imitating natural bacterial interactions. In other database was used to conduct bibliometric analysis, covering the
contexts, it can be referred as a fuel cell in which catalytic reac- period of 1962–2018. As per the knowledge of the authors, until
tions of microorganisms assist to convert the chemical energy of date, there is no comprehensive quantitative literature review
the substrate to electrical energy. The name ‘‘bio-electrochemical’’ published that uses the WoS database to map the MFC field from
owes to the involvement of microorganisms, usually bacteria, and 1970–2020. Hence, conduction of the first content analysis of the
their chemical reaction(s) (Kim et al., 2007; Rahimnejad et al., complete MFC literature (indexed in WoS), published in the last
2015). 50 years, is a notable novelty of this review paper. The main
The phenomena involved in MFC dates back billions of years objectives of this study are as follows:
as microorganisms present in nature were degrading organics. • To map the history of MFC research, so that emergence of
During the study of this natural phenomenon of microbial degra- various research tracks can be unearthed.
dation, Prof. Potter of Durham University-UK explored for the • To provide a stepping stone for novices to understand and
first time that microbes can produce voltage. He was striving to choose a significant and fast-growing area within the MFC
discover the agents that contribute to the oxidation of insoluble research field.
substances (for example, charcoal) in soil, and revealed the phe- • To provide the current focus of MFC research and map the
nomenon of bioelectricity during the same study in 1908 (Potter, future research directions.
1908). Foregoing in view, in the year of 1911, by utilizing the elec-
trical potential of microbes (Saccharomyces), the first microbial 2. Research methodology
cell was discovered by him (Potter, 1911).
For the next two decades, the idea of MFC was under a shade, WoS is a potential journal indexing database (Thelwall, 2018).
until in 1931, when a researcher from Cambridge University, The core collection of WoS is a hub of 21,100 high-quality and
Prof. Cohen, introduced an MFC that produced 35 V. Cohen con- peer-reviewed journals that are further distributed into 250 fields,
nected several MFCs to obtain this voltage. It was the first exper- and are accessed widely. It provides access to more than 53
iment to generate a substantial amount of voltage by adopting million publications and 1.18 billion cited references. Therefore,
the method of stacked MFCs (Singh and Songera, 2012a; Cohen, this database was exploited to search the relevant literature on
1931). In 1963, a new path in the development of MFC was MFCs (Clarivate, 2021).
introduced. DelDuca et al. (1963) for the first time introduced A total of 11,397 publications were extracted from WoS that
Clostridium Butyricum in the anode chamber for hydrogen gener- are relevant to the MFC field, out of which the major portion
ation. This method was not much successful due to the instability comprised of journal articles (81.6%) followed by review arti-
of the production, but it opened a path for forthcoming research cles (11.35%). Further study on these articles have been focused
works. One year later, this instability issue was resolved by the on the publication history, publication distribution, subject cat-
research group of Prof. Suzuki, and the first MFC for hydrogen egory distribution, leading journals, leading countries, leading
production was introduced (Karube et al., 1976). organizations, leading authors and research trends.
Later on, the quest of Prof. Allen (Mercer, 2015) to ensure
low-cost energy for third-world countries brought many design 2.1. Bibliometric analysis
amendments of MFC to light. The optimization of the electron
transport mechanism enabled others to propose optimized MFCs. Bibliometric analysis is a quantitative technique to review
It was soon realized that the main issue associated with the cost the literature of any particular field. This technique is an effec-
of MFC was mediator cost that created a hurdle in its commer- tive method to statistically evaluate the most prolific published
cialization. In 1999, Kim and his co-workers resolved the issue literature and map out the evolution of the field as a func-
by introducing the first mediator-less MFC (Kim et al., 1999). tion of time (Hui et al., 2020; Iftikhar et al., 2019). Therefore,
Afterward, a major milestone was created by researchers from the this study employs a bibliometric analysis technique to map the
University of Queensland-Australia. A joint project between these recent developments of MFC. Similar studies of different top-
researchers and Foster Brewing has led them to convert brew- ics, including marine water environment monitoring (Di Ciaccio
ery waste to CO2 by constructing a MFC prototype (Staff, 2020). and Troisi, 2021), solar cells (Yeo and Jeong, 2020), CO2 cap-
Since then, MFC became a hot topic among researchers, and it is ture (Omoregbe et al., 2020), energy security (Zhou et al., 2018),
witnessed revolutionization each subsequent year. This fact is ev- wind energy (Madvar et al., 2019), 3D printing (Muhammad et al.,
ident from the development of MFCs in various forms, such as mi- 2021) and many others (Losse and Geissdoerfer, 2021; Miot et al.,
crobial desalination cell, microbial wetland cell, microbial waste 2020; Zeng et al., 2021) are present in the literature.
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Fig. 1. Number of publications and citations in MFCs.

Fig. 2. Publication distribution over the decades.

2.2. Content analysis then, MFC failed to get much attention. Starting in 2003, the
number of publications and citations related to this field got
Content analysis is a technique to map out certain keywords boosted, and it kept on increasing each passing year. The year
or concepts in a particular literature domain, in a quantitative 2020 showed the highest number of publications in this field,
manner. It allows researchers to study the emergence of differ- i.e., 1074; while, the highest number of total local citations (TLCs)
ent keywords and their correlation as a function of time. This and total global citations (TGCs) were detected in 2011 (Fig. 1).
technique is employed in this study to map the most frequent The three decades involving publications on MFCs (i.e., 1990s,
keywords involved in MFC-based publications. Additionally, fu- 2000s and 2010s) contributed 1%, 12% and 87%, respectively, of
ture directions of MFC research have also been highlighted based the total publications (see Fig. 2).
on content analysis.
3.2. Publications distribution
3. Results and discussion
Out of the 11,397 publications available in WoS, the research
3.1. Publication history of MFC articles count was found to be 9,236, followed by review articles,
with a count of 1,267. Fig. 3 depicts the contribution of various
The MFC has been a topic of keen interest within the re- document types published in literature on MFCs. The contribu-
search community. The very first publication on the topic of tion share of research articles, reviews, proceeding papers, book
MFC was reported in 1983; however, for almost a decade since chapters, meeting abstracts, early access, editorials, corrections
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Fig. 3. Publication distribution in MFCs.

Fig. 4. Top five subject categories in MFC research.

and others is 81.6%, 11.135%, 8%, 2.9%, 1.75%, 0.57%, 0.41%, 0.28% from electrochemists to spot related chemical changes. Environ-
and 0.3%, respectively. The ‘‘others’’ include news items, letters, mental sciences category deals with the study of environment
retracted publications, books, biographies, notes and retractions, health, toxicology, monitoring and management. Lastly, Engineer-
with 0.16%, 0.053%, 0.035%, 0.018%, 0.009%, 0.009% and 0.009% ing Environmental covers the studies related to anthropogenic
contribution, respectively. impacts on environment and their remedies. It also covers in-
cineration, sludge management and policy development. As MFC
3.3. Subject category distribution has emerged as a green resource of energy that do not have
substantial anthropogenic impacts on the environment, it became
The literature on MFCs, available in WoS, can be classified a hot topic for researchers involved in environment related fields.
into 145 subject categories. The top 5 subject categories are The energy fuel category got tremendous attention after 2011,
energy fuels, biotechnology and applied microbiology, electro- as it contributed 92.52% of the publications from the year 2011 to
chemistry, environmental sciences, and engineering environmen- 2020. Meanwhile, biotechnology has witnessed an almost steady
tal with 26.5%, 26.5%, 17.9%, 17.5%, and 13.3% contributions, re- growth since 2010, with 5%–9% contribution per year. For elec-
spectively, see Fig. 4. trochemistry, 2017–2019 was the most popular era, resulting
Energy fuels category deals with the production, utilization in 37.2% contribution. The ‘‘others’’ field, such as Environmental
and management of combustible nonrenewable fuels and all re- science and engineering environmental showed a high number of
newable energy sources. This category does not include the stud- publications in 2017–2019. Fig. 5 depicts a detailed evolution of
ies related to the nuclear science. Biotechnology and applied different subject categories over the last two decades.
microbiology spans over the multitude of topics related to liv-
ing organisms and their applications to solve human problems. 3.4. Leading journals publishing MFC research
Other than biology-specific topics (genetic engineering, thera-
peutic techniques, etc.), this category also covers the section of Another technique used for quantitative literature review on
bio energy, where MFC overlaps. Electrochemistry deals with MFCs was to carry out analysis of journals. Different journals were
the chemical changes caused by electricity. Since the basic phe- investigated by setting a filter of a minimum of 80 publications
nomenon in MFC is to create electricity, it got much attention and 100 citations. The results depict that 22 out of a total of
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Fig. 5. Evolution of MFC subject categories.

Fig. 6. Leading journals in MFC research.

1147 journals met the threshold criterion, as depicted in Fig. 6. 3.5. Leading countries involved in MFC research
Bioresource Technology was observed to have the highest impact,
The country-based analysis was performed for this quanti-
followed by the Journal of Power Sources and International Journal tative literature review, using the web of science; and it was
of Hydrogen Energy. found that 98 countries are working on MFC-based technologies.
A minimum benchmark of 30 document publications and 100 ci-
Table 1 presents ‘‘individual documents published’’ and ‘‘cita- tations was set for filtering the leading contributors. This resulted
tions received’’ by the top 15 journals that account for 85.44% of in 45 countries meeting the threshold conditions, see Fig. 7. In
Fig. 7, the size of the circle shows the contribution of a country,
the documents published and 85.58% of the citations received so
while the connecting lines show the collaboration between two
far in the field of MFCs. countries.
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Table 1
Top 15 journals in MFC research.
Source Documents Citations Documents Citation
contribution contribution
Bioresource Technology 834 32346 20.27% 18.71%
Journal of Power Sources 406 16353 9.87% 9.46%
International Journal of Hydrogen Energy 398 11589 9.67% 6.70%
Environmental Science & Technology 229 32660 5.57% 18.89%
Electrochimica Acta 220 6188 5.35% 3.58%
Bioelectrochemistry 208 5324 5.05% 3.08%
Chemical Engineering Journal 196 5142 4.76% 2.97%
Biosensors & Bioelectronics 195 11415 4.74% 6.60%
RSC Advances 171 2462 4.16% 1.42%
Water Research 135 9380 3.28% 5.43%
Science of The Total Environment 117 1353 2.84% 0.78%
Water Science and -Technology 110 2538 2.67% 1.47%
Journal of Chemical Technology and Biotechnology 100 2146 2.43% 1.24%
Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology 99 6494 2.41% 3.76%
Biochemical Engineering Journal 98 2559 2.38% 1.48%

Fig. 7. Leading countries in MFC research.

It was also found that among the 98 countries, 15 countries 3.6. Leading research organizations involved on MFC research
produced the highest contributions in MFC field (accounting for
80.38% documents and 88.32% citations), with China as the lead- Globally, there are 3866 organizations working in the domain
of MFC. These organizations were filtered by setting a minimum
ing country with 26.74% publications and 21.04% citations. The threshold condition of 60 documents and 100 citations. 34 orga-
next country in the category is USA, with 16.95% publications and nizations were found to meet the required criteria, as depicted
29.70% citations, followed by India (7.69% publications and 4.16% in Fig. 8. The top 15 organizations have contributed about 63.91%
of the documents and 56.67% of the citations. Chinese Academy
citations). The individual contribution of 15 countries has been of Sciences, followed by Penn State University and Harbin In-
given in Table 2. stitute of technology are the top contributors. The individual
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Fig. 8. Leading organizations in MFC research.

Table 2 The analysis of the top leading authors of the field reveals that
Top 15 countries in MFC research. China is the country with the highest number of authors in the
Country Documents Citations Documents Citation list of top 15 leading authors. In fact, 7 out of the 15 authors in
contribution contribution
Table 4 belongs to China, which verifies the facts stated in the
China 3147 80196 26.74% 21.04% country analysis. In addition, it is also pertinent to mention that
USA 1995 113213 16.95% 29.70%
some leading authors have affiliation to universities from both
India 905 15868 7.69% 4.16%
South Korea 597 22152 5.07% 5.81% China and USA.
England 425 14786 3.61% 3.88%
Japan 322 9994 2.74% 2.62% 3.8. MFC research directions
Germany 317 11906 2.69% 3.12%
Spain 313 7641 2.66% 2.00% 3.8.1. MFC research evolution
Taiwan 275 4755 2.34% 1.25%
Italy 252 7153 2.14% 1.88%
There are various techniques available to map the research
Australia 238 10391 2.02% 2.73% directions of a field. Data mining technique is usually employed
Canada 238 7662 2.02% 2.01% to extract the author’s keyword or keyword plus. The author’s
France 229 6693 1.95% 1.76% keyword analysis only analyzes the title and abstract of articles,
Malaysia 204 3819 1.73% 1.00% while keyword plus analysis analyzes the whole article to find the
Iran 203 3294 1.72% 0.86%
most frequent keywords. Therefore, in this study, the keyword
plus technique has been employed to map the research trend in
MFC.
contribution of the top 15 organizations has been depicted in For quantitative analysis of MFC literature, by employing the
Table 3. keyword plus technique, 9404 keywords have been extracted
under the filter of ‘‘articles’’ only. Some of the keywords were
less frequent; therefore, a filter has been applied here as well.
3.7. Leading authors in MFC research
The minimum occurrence of keywords was set to 100 and the
resulting number obtained was 105 keywords. Fig. 10 depicts the
A quantitative literature review on author analysis has been mapping of these keywords. The bigger the circle, the more fre-
performed to find the leading authors in the field of MFC. A quently it appears. On the other hand, the thicker the connection
minimum benchmark of 100 citations and 50 documents was set, line, the higher is the frequency of co-occurrence.
and only 37 authors met the required conditions as depicted in It has been found that the most frequently used keyword
Fig. 9. It is to be noted that most of the authors are Chinese is ‘‘performance’’, followed by ‘‘electricity-generation’’. Fig. 10
as China is the main hub for MFC research, as observed in the further elaborates that the period of 2015–2016 was an emerging
above mentioned country analysis. Out of these 37 authors, the era for microbial fuel cells, as depicted by the vast contribution
contribution of the top 15 is 50.66% in publications and 65.46% of color noted for this era. Moreover, from 2017 onwards, MFC
in citations. The individual contribution of each author has been research has increasingly involved the fields of nanoparticles, air
depicted in Table 4. cathode, catalyst, nitrogen removal and graphene.
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Table 3
Top 15 organizations in MFC research.
Organization Documents Citations Documents Citations
contribution contribution
Chinese Academy of Sciences 458 11262 11.53% 6.11%
Harbin Institute of Technology 342 11467 8.61% 6.23%
Penn State University 312 35774 7.85% 19.42%
Nankai University 160 4867 4.03% 2.64%
Indian Institute of Technology 156 4166 3.93% 2.26%
Tsinghua University 152 5702 3.83% 3.10%
Dalian University of Technology 144 4038 3.62% 2.19%
University of Science & Technology China 114 5261 2.87% 2.86%
Tianjin University 112 2488 2.82% 1.35%
Southeast University 104 1709 2.62% 0.93%
The University of Queensland 101 7478 2.54% 4.06%
University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences 98 1245 2.47% 0.68%
Chongqing University 96 1291 2.42% 0.70%
Technical University of Denmark 96 2994 2.42% 1.63%
Nanyang Technological University 94 4630 2.37% 2.51%

Fig. 9. Leading authors in MFC research.

Out of the 105 keywords, top keywords were selected and 2021). MFC has widely been used as a source of clean energy
analyzed to determine the contributing percentage of occurrence production, and over the time it has evolved as a renewable
of each keyword, see Table 5. The performance of MFC is the main energy source. Owing to this fact, energy production applica-
challenge toward its applications in industrial sector. Low power tion is mostly discussed in literature (Obileke et al., 2021); and
density and difficulties in reproducibility of the experiments are
therefore, appears among the most frequently used keywords.
the main limiting factors for MFCs (Jadhav et al., 2020). From the
With respect to applications, waste water treatment is the second
published literature, it is evident that researchers have demon-
strated interest in improving the MFC performance by proposing most discussed application of MFC. A range of heavy metals,
various methods, such as employing algae (Khandelwal et al., including Cr, Cu, Co, V and Hg, have been reported to be reduced
2020), nanoparticles (Jiang et al., 2021), nanotubes (Tsai et al., by employing MFC-based technology (Ezziat et al., 2019; Chonde,
2009) and many others (Li et al., 2018; Hu et al., 2021; Aiyer, 2014).
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Table 4
Top 15 authors in MFC research.
Author Documents Citations Document Citation Affiliation
contribution contribution
‘‘Logan, Bruce E.’’ 241 20539 9.08% 15.59% Penn State University
‘‘Lovley, Derek R.’’ 53 7145 2.00% 5.42% University of Massachusetts
‘‘Rabaey, Korneel’’ 62 6789 2.34% 5.15% Ghent University
‘‘Cheng, Shaoan’’ 57 6745 2.15% 5.12% Zhejiang University
‘‘He, Zhen’’ 115 5862 4.33% 4.45% Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
‘‘Wang, Xin’’ 91 5035 3.43% 3.82% Nankai University
‘‘Buisman, Cees J. N.’’ 60 4652 2.26% 3.53% Wageningen Universit
‘‘Huang, Xia’’ 90 4113 3.39% 3.12% Tsinghua University
‘‘Schroeder, Uwe’’ 57 3833 2.15% 2.91% Technical University of Braunschweig
‘‘Mohan, S. Venkata’’ 104 3827 3.92% 2.91% Council of Scientific and Industrial Research
‘‘Liu, Hong’’ 82 3753 3.09% 2.85% Beihang University
‘‘Ren, Nanqi’’ 78 3682 2.94% 2.80% Harbin Institute of Technology
‘‘Feng, Yujie’’ 99 3526 3.73% 2.68% Harbin Institute of Technology
‘‘Liang, Peng’’ 85 3374 3.20% 2.56% Tsinghua University
‘‘Yu, Han-Ging’’ 71 3360 2.67% 2.55% King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

Fig. 10. Most frequent keywords used in MFC publications.

MFC primarily uses organic waste to produce electricity, treat- a topic of interest in all types of fuel cells (Bessel et al., 2001).
ing the waste-containing water in the process (Singh and Songera, References (Hamed et al., 2020; Kalathil et al., 2017; Konovalova
2012b). In this way, it has become a promising technology for et al., 2018; Cao et al., 2019) provide a detailed look into the
waste reduction. Different wastes used n MFC as the substrate effects of electrodes (Hamed et al., 2020; Kalathil et al., 2017) and
are agricultural waste, cassava waste, vegetable waste, brewery microbes (Konovalova et al., 2018; Cao et al., 2019) on the MFC
waste, chocolate industry waste, domestic waste, starch pro- performance.
cessing waste water, chicken feather, azo dyes and rice straw Additionally, the topic of electron transfer and membrane
waste (Chaturvedi and Verma, 2016). With respect to MFC design conductivity in MFCs are among the most discussed topics of the
modification and performance enhancement, electrodes (cathode field. In the study (Chaturvedi and Verma, 2016), after reviewing
and anode) and type of microbes used play a vital role. Adequate recent literature it was concluded that low electron transfer and
selection of material and design of electrodes has always been membrane selection/design are among the main drawbacks of
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Fig. 11. Microbial fuel cell research areas.

Table 5 The engineering area deals with the overall design of MFCs,
Most frequent keywords used in the MFC field. and includes chamber design, innovation in configurations, etc.
Keywords Frequency of occurrence (%) Energy fuels cater to the development, optimization, application
Performance 9.92 and management of renewable and nonrenewable sources. In the
Electricity generation 8.19 case of MFC, it refers to the green energy production aspect of
Microbial fuel cell 4.67
Waste water treatment 4.31
MFCs. Biotechnology deals with implementation of various mi-
Waste reduction 3.13 crobes, as well as developing or optimizing mathematical models
Anode 2.13 such as biofilm models. The chemistry research area covers all
Cathode 2.10 aspects of chemical reactions that take place in MFCs. It has been
Bacteria 2.09
observed that since 2008 a substantial growth rate has taken
Electron transfer 2.05
Degradation 1.85 place in all of the top 4 areas. It is pertinent to note that in the last
Membrane 1.71 two decades, the research area of MFC has grown at the highest
Oxidation reaction 1.66 rate.

3.8.4. Recent hot topics

There are six prolific papers available in WoS related to the
MFCs that needs more attention to commercialize this technol-
MFC field, see Table 8. Out of these 6 papers, 4 are review articles
ogy. The field of electrochemical modeling of MFC is also widely
and 2 are research papers. These prolific articles focused on the
discussed, especially in the current era. MFC has several electro-
use of MFC for waste treatment. Meanwhile, optimization of the
chemical models, but these are difficult to understand. Therefore,
MFC performance is the main hot research topic. Additionally, as
to predict the MFC performance accurately, research community
aforementioned in the keyword analysis section (Fig. 10), key-
is active to propose easily understandable models of MFC. words such as nanoparticles, catalysts, air electrodes, graphene
electrodes, power enhancement, air cathode, nitrogen removal
3.8.2. Most cited articles and metal recovery have got increased attention recently, and is
The most cited articles of a field provide a deep insight into still under the development phase. Therefore, these mentioned
the fundamental and crucial aspects of the field. Therefore, the keywords serve as the current hot topics of the field.
top 10 most cited articles on MFCs have been sorted and listed in
Table 6. 4. Conclusion

3.8.3. Major research areas In this study, a quantitative analysis of the MFC literature
has been performed. About 11,397 publications available in WoS,
In MFC research, about 94 major areas have been identified;
covering a time period of 1970–2020, have been analyzed. The
and the leading research areas include engineering, energy fuels,
major findings can be summarized as:
biotechnology and chemistry with contributions of 26.6%, 26.5%,
26.5% and 24.8% (% of the total publication), respectively. The • Year 2020 witnessed the highest number of publications
evolution of these top research areas over the timeline of 2000– (1074) in the history of MFC research, while the highest
2020 has been depicted in Fig. 11. Table 7 can be referred to numbers of total local and total global citations were re-
realize the top 20 areas in MFC research. ceived in 2011.
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Table 6
Top 10 most cited papers in MFC research.

Citations Title Ref

2730 Microbial Fuel Cells: Methodology and Technology Logan et al. (2006)
1070 Electricity Generation Using an Air-Cathode Single Chamber Microbial Fuel Cell in Liu and Logan (2004)
the Presence and Absence of a Proton Exchange Membrane
1008 Microbial fuel cells: novel biotechnology for energy generation Rabaey and Verstraete (2005)
968 Electricity Production by Geobacter sulfurreducens Attached to Electrodes Bond and Lovley (2003)
926 Exoelectrogenic bacteria that power microbial fuel cells Logan (2009)
747 Production of Electricity during Wastewater Treatment Using a Single Chamber Liu et al. (2004)
Microbial Fuel Cell
729 A review of the substrates used in microbial fuel cells (MFCs) for sustainable energy Pant et al. (2010)
production
703 Microbial fuel cells Logan (2008)
678 Increased performance of single-chamber microbial fuel cells using an improved Cheng et al. (2006)
cathode structure
642 Electricity generation by direct oxidation of glucose in mediator-less microbial fuel Chaudhuri and Lovley (2003)
cells

Table 7 • About 1147 international journals have been involved in

Major research areas in MFC. MFC-related publications , with Bioresource Technology,
Research area Publications % of Total Journal of Power Sources and International Journal of Hy-
publications
drogen Energy serving as the leading ones.
Engineering 3031 26.639 • China appears at the top of the list in MFC research with
Energy fuels 3024 26.578
Biotechnology applied microbiology 3019 26.534
respect to the number of publications, while USA is at the
Chemistry 2822 24.802 top of the list with respect to the number of citations.
Environmental sciences ecology 2055 18.061 • Chinese Academy of Sciences, Penn State university and
Electrochemistry 2048 18 Harbin Institute of Technology are the leading research or-
Science technology other topics 1281 11.259
ganizations in the MFC field.
Materials science 1119 9.835
Agriculture 1031 9.061 • The main focus of research in MFC from 1970–2020 has been
Biochemistry molecular biology 659 5.792 to optimize the performance of MFC. With respect to MFC
Microbiology 616 5.414 applications, researchers have focused on electricity gener-
Water resources 518 4.553 ation and waste treatment. To improve the performance of
Biophysics 480 4.219
Physics 332 2.918
MFC, the most discussed topics are electrodes (material and
Life sciences biomedicine other topics 254 2.232 design) and microbes used in MFCs.
Polymer science 127 1.116 • A total of 94 major research areas have been found to
Food science technology 118 1.037 lie within the domain of MFC research, with engineering,
Instruments instrumentation 109 0.958
energy fuels, biotechnology and chemistry serving as the top
Thermodynamics 87 0.765
contributing fields.
• Nanoparticles, catalysts, air electrode, graphene electrodes,
power enhancement, air cathode, nitrogen removal, and
• The decade of 2011–2020 has contributed the most toward metal recovery have been identified as hot research top-
MFC research, accounting for 87% of all MFC literature. ics. These research topics are the future of MFCs. Employ-
• Out of the total publications, 81.6% were research articles ing nanoparticles has resulted in substantial enhancement
of the MFC performance. In the days to come, MFC may
while 11.135% were review articles.
find its applications in industry owing to nanotechnology
• 145 subject categories are involved in the domain of MFC, utilization.
with energy fuel and microbiology appearing as the leading This study has employed the Web of Science database. No
subjects with 26.5% contribution each. doubt, WoS is among the most trusted source of indexing;

Table 8
Hot papers in MFC research.

Title Year Ref

Control Strategy for Adaptive Active Energy Harvesting in 2020 Ma et al. (2020)
Sediment Microbial Fuel Cells
Electroactive microorganisms in bioelectrochemical systems 2019 Logan et al. (2019)
Short Chain Fatty Acids (SCFAs)-Mediated Gut Epithelial 2019 Parada Venegas et al.
and Immune Regulation and Its Relevance for Inflammatory (2019)
Bowel Diseases
Microbial fuel cells: An overview of current technology 2019 Slate et al. (2019)
Start-Up Process Modeling of Sediment Microbial Fuel Cells 2019 Ma et al. (2019)
Based on Data Driven
Heterogeneous electro-Fenton and photoelectro-Fenton 2018 Ganiyu et al. (2018)
processes: A critical review of fundamental principles and
application for water/wastewater treatment

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however, it does not cover all the articles published in any DelDuca, M., Friscoe, J., Zurilla, R., 1963. Developments in industrial microbiology.
specific year. Therefore, in future, similar studies can be Am. Inst. Biol. Sci. 4, 81–84.
Di Ciaccio, F., Troisi, S., 2021. Monitoring marine environments with Autonomous
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The authors declare that they have no known competing finan- Jadhav, D.A., Carmona-Martínez, A.A., Chendake, A.D., Pandit, S., Pant, D., 2020.
cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared Modeling and optimization strategies towards performance enhancement of
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Jiang, P.-Y., Xiao, Z.-H., Wang, Y.-F., Li, N., Liu, Z.-Q., 2021. Enhanced performance
This work was supported/funded by the Ministry of Higher of microbial fuel cells using Ag nanoparticles modified Co, N co-doped
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Education, Malaysia under Fundamental Research Grant Scheme
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