Capacitive deionization (CDI) as an emerging desalination technology attracts increasing attention due to its advantages such as low cost, environmental friendliness, simple operation, and large water recovery. This study presents a systematic, objective, and comprehensive review of CDI research via scientometric analysis. The dataset was collected from Web of Science and analysed by software Biblioshiny, VOSviewer and CiteSpace. After analysing a sum of 2270 documents, we identified the most influential journals, countries, institutions, authors, and publications. We also mapped the networks of co-authorship, co-citation, and keywords co-occurrence. Desalination has the largest number of publications in CDI. China is the country with the largest number of publications, and Egypt has the highest level of international collaboration. The keyword and cluster analyses demonstrate the evolution of CDI electrodes from traditional carbon materials through carbon-based nanomaterials to Faradaic materials and the diversification of CDI cell architectures. The timeline visualization displays five popular research topics, including electrode materials, charge efficiency, water salinity, CDI cell architectures, and selective removal. Moreover, we provided several recommendations for future research. This article will give authors an intuitive understanding of the research status, frontier topics, and emerging trends in CDI.
