Ground source heat pumps: Recent progress, applications, challenges, barriers, and role in achieving sustainable development goals based on bibliometric analysis

Ground source heat pumps (GSHPs) have shown great potential to replace conventional heating and cooling systems in many regions. They also have a significant contribution to the achievement of sustainable development goals (SDGs). This paper aims to investigate the advancements, applications, research trends related to GSHPs, and the challenges and barriers that face their development based on a bibliometric analysis. The results show that in recent years, a considerable growth in GSHP’s research has been recognized, with a focus on heating more than cooling, which is due to the fact that GSHP is more suitable for cold regions. The major part of the research done on GSHPs in relation to the SDGs focused on SDG 7, followed by SDG 13. This is mainly due to the direct relation between GSHPs and the environment. However, it was also found that GSHPs have a crucial contribution to the other SDGs, but there was insufficient work dedicated to investigating such relations. Based on the interpretation of the bibliometric analysis, it was deduced that most of the challenges and barriers to GSHPs are related to the capital cost, groundwater contamination, regulations, subsidies, and incentives.