Project Details:

Bibliometric Analysis of Research on Secondary Organic Aerosols (SOA) in Atmospheric and Environmental Journals

Atmospheric chemists investigating tropospheric ozone - its formation, reactions, environmental and health effects - became increasingly aware of the paramount role of Secondary Organic Aerosols (SOA) in air pollution and of their detrimental effects that often have been ascribed to ozone. After 1976, when first mentioned by D. Grosjean, SOA name appears in over 2000 SCI papers now. By analyzing them, with emphasis on SOA formation and deposition, using their titles, abstracts, author keywords, keywords plus, source institutions, source countries and the most cited papers we expect to get insight to connections, status, and trends in this field of research.

The Pearl River Delta (PRD) and the Megacity Initiative: Local and Global Research Observations (MILAGRO) projects, two atmospheric research campaigns in 2006 and 2009, respectively, were dedicated to determine the role of ozone, precursors, reaction products, meteorology, geography etc. in development of air pollution and its hazardous effects in megacities and their surroundings. Both confirmed the importance of SOA i.e. of the process of conversion the primary pollutants and aerosols to them. Organic aerosols are considered to be either anthropogenic or of natural origin. First are generally connected to exhaust of combustion devices (power stations, air, water and land traffic, burning) and the other to physical (wind, evaporation, condensation or by some catastrophe induced introduction of organic volatiles (VOCs), chemical (wildfire, degradation, soil/air and water/air exchange) and biological (BVOC mostly from plants) supply of organics to the atmosphere. In a way all could be considered as primary OA although generally only the anthropogenic ones are counted as such. An important point is that all are source for SOA formation, thus becoming the main result of ozone pollution chemistry that by its volume exceeds all model predictions.

All this makes study of SOA important and needed in the future. This study is conceived to assess the characteristics of the research patterns, tendencies, and methods in the papers. Articles referring to secondary organic aerosols will be assessed by distribution of source countries, source institutes, paper titles, author, keywords, KeyWords Plus, abstracts, and the most cited articles in these years. The proposed analysis may give hints about the history and for the future research directions.

 

June 2013 – A technical report “Bibliometric analysis of research on secondary organic aerosols: A Science Citation Index Expanded-based analysis” has been published in Pure Appl. Chem., 2013, Vol. 85, No. 6, pp. 1241-1255; http://dx.doi.org/10.1351/PAC-REP-12-08-09

Last update 7 June 2013

• Klasinc, Leo

• Veber, Marjan
• Zhang, Yuanhang