Global Trends of Antifouling Marine Coating in Seaweed Research with Scientomectric Analysis and Knowledge Maps

Abstract One of the most exciting alternatives to dangerous paints based on heavy metals is the development of coatings that act as natural anti-settlement agents and prevent fouling by utilising active ingredients found in seaweed. This is why understanding the field's extraordinary growth—which encompasses a wide range of topics like marine fouling, anti-biofilm, anti-fouling, future bioprospecting, and marine coating in general—requires evaluating the current body of research on seaweed's antifouling. For this kind of evaluation, summaries of description and co-citation analyses are both required to understand the scope of this study and identify research gaps. Given the topic's importance and the fact that it has received insufficient attention, this study fills a void in seaweed’s antifouling research. Using the CiteSpace software, we examined seaweed’s antifouling research published in the WOSCC database between 1991 and 2022. This produced 13,197 records in total, with a focus on factors in scientomectric analysis using CiteSpace software. We also discovered that seaweed paper increased exponentially, with productive countries (UK, Germany, and Brazil) contributing the most. The author from Brazil, French and the UK are the world's top productive author on antifouling of seaweed study. The most productive journal, unsurprisingly, was Seaweed. We discovered that keywords like "marine macroalgae," secondary metabolites" and "algae" were among the most cited and prominent in antifouling in seaweed research scope. As far as our understanding extends, this study represents the inaugural utilization of scientometric analyses employing CiteSpace software to pinpoint trends within antifouling research related to seaweed.