A bibliometric analysis of micro electro mechanical system energy harvester research

Micro Electro Mechanical System (MEMS) energy harvester's research interests have been increasing rapidly, indicating that the topic has given significant contributions to the sustainable development of energy alternatives. Although many research activities have been conducted and reported since several years ago, only limited efforts have been made to analyze the research's impact in this area. In this paper, we report a bibliometric analysis on the research progress in MEMS for energy harvester. VOSviewer software is used to support the analyst that includes the distributions of the publication journals, authors, affiliations and the highly cited papers reporting the progress as well as the frequency of keywords and their relationships found in the search engine. The analysis is mainly aimed to identify the research map based on publication reports. 1772 papers were initially identified and summarized based on the analysis on three focused mainstream research topics in MEMS for alternative energy, such as MEMS energy harvester, power harvesting and energy scavenging, other term analogies to MEMS such as micromachines and microsystem were included in the analysis parameter. As a result, it is found that the study on the MEMS energy harvester is mostly categorized in the engineering field, while China has been conducting the most projects. The Journal MEMS and Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering have been the most journals publishing reports on MEMS energy harvester's research progress. Based on these analyses, some potential issues in future MEMS energy harvester research have been identified, including the contributions of new materials, the MEMS new structure's involvement, and the optimization of the vibration concepts and principles of MEMS energy harvester. These analyses would give an overview on the progress of the development and improvement in MEMS energy harvester and give a proper guideline for future MEMS research in the energy field.