Research progress, hotspot evolution, and future trends of geopolymer concrete: A bibliometric review in the period 2000–2024

Geopolymer concrete (GPC) has become a cutting-edge material to replace ordinary Portland concrete (OPC) due to its low-carbon and environmentally friendly characteristics and excellent performance, and has received a great deal of attention from researchers around the world in recent years. In this paper, we used CiteSpace software to conduct bibliometric and visualization analyses of 2495 documents from 2004 to 2024 included in the Web of Science (WOS) database, focusing on the core academic strengths, research hotspots, and evolutionary paths in the field. The results show that global GPC research has shown significant growth, with China, India and Australia being the main countries producing results, and a number of Australian institutions and scholars such as Davidovits being influential in the field; The keyword co-occurrence analysis shows that the research hotspots focus on industrial solid waste utilization, mechanical property enhancement, fibre toughening and durability prediction. The co-citation clustering identifies six major topic clusters covering key topics such as raw material activation mechanisms, composite material performance enhancement and machine learning (ML) performance prediction. This study is helpful for researchers to fully understand the current hotspots and future research trends in the field of GPC.