Abstract: With the rapid development of modern industry, hazardous waste pollution had become a prominent environmental problem. In order to comprehensively understand the current status and direction of hazardous waste research, the literature in the field of hazardous waste research in Web of Science and China National Knowledge Infrastructure databases was summarized and organized, and the current situation, frontier hot spots and development trends of hazardous waste research in the past 20 years were analyzed using bibliometric methods. The results showed that the scale of publications and scientific cooperation in the field of hazardous waste research had shown a steady increase, and many countries had shown a high degree of attention to it. China’s development in this field had accelerated since 2009, and had ranked first in the world in terms of the number of articles published and the scale of international cooperation. The bibliometric results showed that the current field of hazardous waste was mainly focused on the formulation of policy standards, disposal technology development and environmental impact assessment of pollutants. Adsorption, solidification/stabilization and co-processing were the main disposal technologies developed in this field.And the migration release and leaching toxicity of heavy metals, arsenic and dioxins were the hotspots in this field. Under the circular economy, the life cycle assessment which was conducive to the comprehensive utilization of hazardous waste, had begun to replace the previous one-sided and single research approach. The realization of hazardous waste reduction, harmless and resource utilization would become the starting point and primary goal of hazardous waste research in the future.

Key words: hazardous waste, bibliometrics, research hotspots, knowledge maps, development trends