A bibliometric analysis of research on haze during 2000-2016

As one of the bibliometric analysis tools, CiteSpace software was applied to quantitatively and visually evaluate global scientific documents of research on haze from 2000 to 2016. Five thousand six hundred six documents from the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-Expanded) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) of the Web of Science database were statistically analyzed and examined. The distributions on authorship, countries/territories, institutes, and keywords were generated. The amount of publications has increased nearly for the past 17 years. The most productive author was Li J. with 46 articles. The publications on haze research were primarily originated from the USA, China, Germany, and France. By synthetically analyzing the keywords, the dominant hot spots of haze research could be concluded as "aerosol," "atmosphere," "particle," "PM_2.5,"and "air quality."