First systematic review on PM-bound water: exploring the existing knowledge domain using the CiteSpace software

Aerosol water is a master component of atmospheric aerosols and a medium that enables all aqueous-phase reactions occurring in the atmosphere. This integral chemical compound of suspended aerosol particles (PM) has become one of the hottest issues in recent years. To look for scientific productivity in the area of PM-bound water research a bibliometric analysis was performed. Most actual literature regarding aerosol and particulate bound water and implications of the research in this field was downloaded from WOS database using 1996–2018 timespan. Different bibliographic statistics were used to get a general profile of leading authorships, institutions, countries and mainstream journals providing most highly cited articles in the field. Using the CiteSpace software it was possible to identify past trends and possible future directions in measuring aerosol bound water. The search terms used in the database were {“aerosol” AND “water” OR “chemical mass balance”} AND {“particulate matter” OR “PM-bound water” OR “hygroscopic”}. The answers to the following questions were found: which authors, countries, institutions and aerosol journals to the greatest degree influenced PM-bound water research?. The network of co-occurring noun phrases was extracted from the set of publications, followed by co-citation analysis. The network was also clustered by top terms which gave a clear picture of topics most often undertaken. Finally the publication meeting eligibility criteria were looked for chemical compounds most frequently determined in PM-bound water research, which help to indicate works where quantitative assessment of PM-bound water was performed. Obtained results indicate that the paper with the greatest citation burst was Tang and Munkelwitz (J Geophys Res Atmos 99(D9):18801–18808, 1994). The largest number of articles in this specific field was published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. An absolute leader in the quantity of publications among all research institutions is National Aeronautics Space Administration NASA. Meteorology and Atmospheric sciences is the discipline most occupied by highly cited journals in this field. Clustering results indicate that the research has mainly focused on hygroscopic measurement of aerosol, hygroscopic growth of particles; aerosol liquid water, and hygroscopic behavior. Most articles rather points PM-bound water as an artifact in organic carbon and ions measurements without detailed analysis of its contents or probable origin. The number of publications in each cluster of the build network is relatively high, which indicate that scholars have formed a rather consistent studies in the theme of aerosol-bound water. Despite a relevant role played by aerosol-bound water in atmospheric processes a quantitative description of its contents is rather rarely found in the literature (with the total number of only 23 papers concerning PM-bound water contents). In terms of yield, USA, China and Italy ranked highest, playing a propelling role in the research on PM-bound water. Future trends in PM-bound water research should be directed to a quantitative measurements of its contents; source apportionment, chemical composition of PM—modulating its hygroscopicity and therefore cloud formation processes, and the assessment of artefacts influencing the quality of PM-bound water measurements. Those areas should be especially developed in future studies and scientific projects concerning atmospheric water.