Biobased Compounds and the Circular Economy: A Bibliometric Review of Waste Valorization and Environmental Sustainability.

The global plastic crisis, driven by 367 million tons of annual production and persistent environmental contamination, has intensified research into biobased compounds as sustainable alternatives. However, significant gaps remain in understanding the scientific landscape, research priorities, and industrial scalability of these materials. This study conducts a comprehensive bibliometric and systematic review to map the knowledge structure of biobased compounds and circular economy research. A refined search strategy was executed in Scopus (June 2026), retrieving 1350 documents, which were screened following PRISMA guidelines, resulting in a final dataset of 1306 peer-reviewed documents. The search strategy was designed to be comprehensive, capturing both the core biobased compounds literature and adjacent sustainability science (e.g., life cycle assessment, circular economy frameworks) that provides essential methodological foundations for the field. Bibliometric analyses were performed using RStudio/bibliometrix for descriptive statistics, VOSviewer for co-authorship and keyword co-occurrence networks, and Plotly Studio for interactive visualizations. The results reveal exponential growth in scientific production (R