Ziyi Jia ^1,2 Angzu Cai ³ Rui Li ¹ Xia Wang ¹ Yuan Liu ^2*

• ¹ College of Energy and Environment Engineering, Hebei University of Engineering, Handan, China
• ² Farmland Irrigation Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing, Henan Province, China
• ³ College of Environmental Science and Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, Shanghai Municipality, China

In recent decades, more and more studies have been conducted on source appointment of heavy metals, since they can accumulate in the food chain and have a negative impact on the ecological environment and human health. However, almost never before had scholars tried to make a comprehensive and methodical review in this field from the scientometric and bibliometric perspective. The purpose of this review is to offer insights into the research topics and trend evaluation in terms of source appointment of heavy metals over time using the visualization and analysis software, CiteSpace. We retrieved a total of 2533 articles from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) dated between 1994 and 2022, and analysed the progress, hotspots, and trends in this field by synthesized networks of cooperation analysis, co-citation analysis, keyword cooccurrence and cluster analysis, and keywords burst analysis. The overall development of the topic can be divided into four periods, and the rapid development began from 2010. Environmental Sciences was the leading subject category, and the journal Science of the Total Environment had the highest number of publications (9.51%), which was most cited as well (2390 times). China published the most articles in this field, in which Chinese Academy of Sciences was the leading institution.Said Muhammad and Xinwei Lu were the top 2 most productive authors. According to citation frequency, Hakanson L was the movers and shakers. Keyword co-occurrence and cluster analysis results showed that "the health risk assessment", "lake sediments", "trace elements", "positive matrix factorization", "air pollution", "road dust", and "megacity" are likely to be hotspots. The "particulate matter", "China", "sediments" and "road dust" demonstrated the research tendencies of this domain by keyword burst analysis. geochemical cycle of the ecosystem. The sources of heavy metals in the environment can be divided into natural sources and man-made sources. The natural source is influenced by geological background and weathering of parent rock. Man-made sources are affected by human activities, including mining, smelting, transportation, the improper discharge and use of industrial wastewater and domestic sewage, and the overuse of pesticides and fertilizers (De Temmerman et al., 2003;