Sources of atmospheric pollution: a bibliometric analysis

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.