Assessment of world aerosol research trends by bibliometric analysis

This study was to explore a bibliometric approach to quantitatively assessing current research trends on atmospheric aerosol, using the related literature in the Science Citation Index (SCI) database from 1991 to 2006. Articles were concentrated on the analysis by scientific output, research performances by individuals, institutes and countries, and trends by the frequency of keywords used. Over the years, there had been a notably growth trend in research outputs, along with more participation and collaboration of institutes and countries. Research collaborative papers shifted from national inter-institutional to international collaboration. The decreasing share of world total and independent articles by the seven major industrialized countries (G7) was examined. Aerosol research in environmental and chemical related fields other than in medical fields was the mainstream of current years. Finally, author keywords, words in title and keywords plus were analyzed contrastively, with research trends and recent hotspots provided.