Research trends on ash stabilization in the pavement during 2002-2021

Incineration ash stabilization in the pavement is an effective approach to reduce environmental impact and proper disposal. This study aimed to achieve a bibliometric analysis of "ash stabilization in pavement" research during 2002-2021, considering language, chronological trends, source types, subject areas, document types, affiliations, journals, countries, and author keywords. Also, social network analysis (SNA) was used for trends mapping and global collaboration determination among countries. The results exposed that the number of publications has been significantly increased by more than 14-fold over the studied period. Engineering (42%), material science (17%), and environmental science (10%) were three major subject areas. The USA, by 383 publications, was the leading country, followed by India (370) and China (288). The most independent rate of the publications belonged to India (93%), while Australia ranked 1st in cooperator publications (63.4%). The "Construction and Building Materials" published the most related articles, followed by "Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering" and "Road Materials and Pavement Design." Among the top ten productive institutes and organizations, four affiliations were from China, and three institutes were from the USA. Edil, T.B. (34) from the USA, Arulrajah, A. (29) from Australia, and Horpibulsuk, S. (24) from Thailand were the most productive authors. "Fly ash," "compressive strength," "durability," "geopolymer," "strength," and "resilient modulus" had the most growth rate in recent years, based on the author keywords analysis. Besides, the increase of emerging keywords, "pervious concrete," "reclaimed asphalt pavement," and "lateritic soil" are noteworthy in the second half period.