# State of the Art in Metal Matrix Composites Research: A Bibliometric Analysis
## 6 Conclusions  
This paper presents a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of metal matrix composites research articles published in the web of science database during the last two decades. The MMC related keywords generated a corpus of 10,018 articles from indices such as SCIE, ESCI, CPCI-S, CPCI-SSH and BCI-S. The bibliometric analysis was carried out under four major categories--publications distribution along different verticals, collaboration analysis, citation landscapes and burst detection. The first category of publication distribution was comprised of verticals such as year on year number of articles, publication types, sources, research directions, productive places, organizations and researchers. The second category included analysis of collaboration among various MMC researchers, affiliating organizations and countries. The third category dealt with mutual citation based linkages among MMC articles, researchers, organizations, places and sources. This section also included a co-occurrence based analysis of MMC related keywords quoted by researchers in their WoS articles. The fourth category provided insights into the top keywords and documents that witnessed strongest citation bursts during the last two decades. Following are the primary findings of the entire bibliometric analysis of metal matrix composites research presented in the current study. 1. The MMC related keywords' search yielded a total of 10,018 articles from the WoS database. 2. The number of MMC publications in WoS started rising after 2005[PERSON] In 2018, 1001 articles were published as compared to just 269 in 2005. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c} \hline \hline
**Rank** & **References** & **Year** & **Strength** & **Begin** & **End** & **2001–2020** \\ \hline
1 & [PERSON], 1994, [PERSON] MATER REV, V39, P1 [115] & 1994 & 72.1562 & 2001 & 2005 \\
2 & [PERSON], 1991, J MATER SCI, V26, P1137 [116] & 1991 & 38.8436 & 2001 & 2005 \\
3 & [PERSON], 1989, ACTA METALL MATER, V37, P3029 [118] & 1989 & 33.77 & 2001 & 2005 \\
4 & [PERSON], 1993, INTRO METAL MATRX C, V0, P0 [119] & 1993 & 33.2064 & 2001 & 2005 \\
5 & [PERSON] JD, 1957, PROC R SOC LON SER-A, V241, P376 [128] & 1957 & 32.0793 & 2001 & 2005 \\
6 & [PERSON], 1991, ACTA METALL MATER, V39, P1871 [121] & 1991 & 29.2619 & 2001 & 2005 \\
7 & LLOYD Dj, 1991, ACTA METALL MATER, V39, P59 [122] & 1991 & 26.4452 & 2001 & 2005 \\
8 & ARSENAULT RJ, 1986, MATER SCI ENG, V81, P175 [41] & 1986 & 26.4452 & 2001 & 2005 \\
9 & MCDANES DL, 1985, METALL TRANS A, V16, P1105 [125] & 1985 & 22.5029 & 2001 & 2005 \\
10 & MOR I, 1973, ACTA METALL MATER, V21, P571 [126] & 1973 & 21.9398 & 2001 & 2005 \\
11 & NARDONE VC, 1986, SCRIFTA METALL MATER, V20, P43 [120] & 1986 & 21.9398 & 2001 & 2005 \\
12 & VOGELSANG M, 1986, METALL TRANS A, V17, P379 [124] & 1986 & 19.6878 & 2001 & 2005 \\
13 & TJONG SC, 2000, MAT SCI ENG R, V29, P49 [127] & 2000 & 19.628 & 2002 & 2005 \\
14 & BRECHT Y, 1991, ACTA METALL MATER, V39, P1781 [123] & 1991 & 18.7652 & 2001 & 2004 \\
15 & [PERSON], 1986, INTERNATIONAL METALS REVIEWS, V31, P115 [117] & 1986 & 17.999 & 2001 & 2005 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 25: The top 15 references with the strongest citation bursts. Research articles comprised 80.54% of all publications. Other publication types include proceedings (21.94%), review articles (3.08%), book chapters (1.11%) and early access manuscripts (0.44%). * 4. The journal 'Materials Science and Engineering A: Structural Materials, Properties, Microstructure and Processing' published the maximum MMC articles (640 papers) in WoS (6.39% of total corpus). The 'Journal of Alloys and Compounds' published 468 (4.67%) articles whereas 'Materials Today Proceedings' contributed 435 (4.34%) papers in WoS. * 5. 'Materials science' emerged as the most significant research direction with 7580 (75.66%) WoS publications. 'Metallurgy/metallurgical engineering' was the second most important research direction with 3242 (32.36%) articles.