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Sources of atmospheric pollution: a bibliometric analysis

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Abstract

A bibliometric analysis based on Web of Science was carried out to provide a critical analysis of the literature on atmospheric pollution sources during 2006–2015. The result showed that particulate matter represented the core of this research field, and methods of source apportionment such as positive matrix factorization were the mainstream techniques. Five clusters were identified from the keywords network with central node of particulate matter, traffic, heavy metal, elemental carbon and renewable energy respectively. The hotspots and their relationships were illustrated to describe the characteristics of this research field. The USA and China took the leading position, however, their research emphasis were health effect and characteristics of pollutants respectively. International collaboration was mostly conducted within Asia–Pacific countries, and EU countries. For journals, Atmospheric Environment was most productive during the study period while Environmental Science and Technology had highest impact factor in 2015. This study provides an effective approach to obtain a general knowledge of the atmospheric pollution sources and supports a deeper understanding of research directions in the future.

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Notes

  1. Author Keywords (hereafter referred to as keywords) are a list of terms provided by original authors to best represent the content of their paper. As a reliable indicator of the gist in the article, the author keywords were selected for SNA to reveal the hotspots of the research filed in this study.

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Acknowledgements

This research has been supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 41571522 and 71673198).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China

    Yixi Li, Yuan Wang, Xue Rui, Yaxiu Li, Yang Li, Huanzhi Wang & Yindong Tong

  2. School of Architecture and Built Environment; Entrepreneurship; Commercialisation and Innovation Centre (ECIC), University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, 5005, Australia

    Jian Zuo

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  1. Yixi Li
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  2. Yuan Wang
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Correspondence to Yuan Wang.

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Li, Y., Wang, Y., Rui, X. et al. Sources of atmospheric pollution: a bibliometric analysis. Scientometrics 112, 1025–1045 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2421-z

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