Decoding the terrain of soil heavy metal(oid)s: Health risk assessment through a bibliometric analysis of trends, hotspots, and future horizons

Abstract

Heavy metal(oid)s contamination in soil is a worldwide concerned issue, considering the potentially far-reaching hazards to ecosystem safe and human health. This study provides a comprehensive and systematic review on health risk assessment associated with soil HMs, and carries out a bibliometric analysis in terms of publication years, case distribution, land use characteristics, citation frequency and assessment models. The findings provide valuable knowledge for understanding research status, hotspots, limitations and future direction in assessing human health risks caused by soil HMs, revealing the rapid development and wide concern on this subject with 930 original articles across 67 countries, covering 21 HMs in 7 land use patterns. However, there is an urgent need for addressing uncertainties in quantifying the intricate relationship between HMs contamination and human health, which highlights the significance of probabilistic assessment methods, localized model parameters as well as the incorporation of bioaccessibility. This study contributes to enhance all-round understanding for soil HMs-related health risk assessment, and has broader prospects for performing a more precise and reliable health risk assessment to guide effective risk management.