Introduction

Aerosols are minute solid particles or liquid droplets scattered in the atmosphere mostly by massive fires, volcanic eruptions, dust storms, and active chemical strains seen in water droplets (Acker et al. 2014; Bisht et al. 2022; Naqvi et al. 2022). Aerosols have become a crucial topic as emerging apprehension on the deterioration of air quality due to pollution concerning climate change as they have been evidently influencing the climate and health (IPCC 2013; Huang 2018; Sweileh et al. 2018; Sun et al. 2020; Han et al. 2021). Aerosols tend to scatter and absorb light, causing a direct effect and a radiative balance; indirect effects influence precipitation during cloud formation (IPCC 2013; Musthaq et al. 2022). Estimating the significance and proportion of radiative forces and effects is a tedious task. Aerosols have been affecting the hydrological cycle, during the condensation process of the clouds, they are also influential during the cloud albedo process, and the potential emitting property of the aerosols which brightens the clouds either for short or long-wave radiation (Graedel et al. 1993; Masih et al. 2019; Nepolian et al. 2021). There may be changes in evaporation when solar radiation and temperature affect the aerosols and impact the hydrological cycle (Ramanathan et al. 2007; Gautam et al. 2021). Aerosol and its interaction with monsoons, convey the natural aerosols as intrinsic elements that derive global climate change and change in land use by external forcing (Li et al. 2016). Cao et al. (2012) found that particulate matter caused during the combustion of fossil fuel which has a detectable impact on health. The optimal yield of rice and wheat is affected by 45% and 75% due to an increase in regional haze pollution in China (Tie et al. 2016). Many such examples are spiraling global challenges around aerosol which is one of the prominent reasons that affects human health and global warming. The increase in mortality rates and cardiopulmonary disease is the result of deteriorating air quality due to aerosols (Krewski et al. 2009, Lepeule et al. 2012, Burnett et al. 2014; Gautam et al. 2020; Kumar et al. 2022). Lelieveld et al. (2015) postulated that by the year 2050, the premature mortality deaths caused by the outdoor PM2.5 would be around 6.2 million annually with an estimated present-day death of 3.15 million deaths annually. Human activities increase the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 30%, because of the radiative forces (Santer et al. 1995). Even research by Liu and Rodriguez, 2005 stated that the average global temperature was found to be increased by 2.15–3.4 °C due to the increased concentration of carbon dioxide. As a result of the anthropogenic influences, the poles at the Artic are affected severely (Gillett et al. 2008). The effect of aerosols and greenhouse gases are also quite contrary to each other. The water vapors, methane, etc., block infrared radiation beyond the atmospheric layer, because of the initial involvement of greenhouse gases, which causes an increase in the surface temperature of the planet (Ehhalt et al. 2001). There are several emerging research to tackle the growing problems in regional and spatial scales, hence understanding aerosol in the area of the Earth system, especially with precipitation can provide sustainable development for our planet (Cao 2017). Few researchers (Trenberth (2020); Aryasree et al. 2020), reported that studies emphasized the importance of the atmospheric aerosols, precipitation, and clouds for the earth’s climate including energy and water cycles. The property of aerosol is to form an effective ice nuclei during the formation of convective clouds (Maheskumar et al. 2018). The ice particles are the main cause of warm rain with the cold-rain process during extreme rainfall events (Kumar et al. 2014; Maheskumar et al. 2018). Few updates observed by researchers (Khain et al. 2008; Lee et al. 2008; 2012) highlighted that the precipitation rate is one of the prime factors that influence the climate conditions based on aerosol loading. Li et al. (2011) also recorded that if the concentration of the aerosols is increased, it increases the precipitation content (higher water content) in the clouds with the development of thick and darker clouds. Stevens and Feingold (2009) reported the inadequacy of current tools, which equally contribute to the leading uncertainties in detecting the effects of aerosols on the environment. The studies also state that, the high-water content clouds leading to heavy precipitation in polluted locations are prone to floods in moist areas and droughts in dry areas, through which aerosols are indirectly linked with socioeconomic conditions. Hence, the following review attempts to assemble the different categories, research domains, and hotspots in the field of aerosol in the context of precipitation by using bibliometric software, which provides a pathway for researchers to investigate and solve the growing pollution caused by the emissions of aerosols (primary or secondary aerosols), with new upgradation for the traditional research studies, which are solely the backbone for future methodologies developed by researchers working in this domain.

Research design and methodology

Bibliometric and text mining pools are systematic processes adapted by researchers to solve research queries (Ranjbari et al. 2022a, b, c, d; Ranjbari et al. 2022a; Ranjbari et al. 2022b; Ranjbari et al. 2022c; Ranjbari et al. 2022d; Ranjbari et al. 2021). In order to analyze the research-based out-turn by the researchers, stakeholders, and policymakers, bibliometric strategies are adopted (Ellegaard and Johan 2015). Considering this, the evaluation and the mapping of the overall potential for the research work carried out in the field integrated with aerosols and precipitation inculcate the answer to the first research question. The research focuses on the publication year, citations, keywords, co-authors, references, and organization of the papers. Bibliographic coupling is carried out where similar bibliographies are clustered based on their references which have been cited; this aggregation is one of the significant parts of the bibliometric analysis. The following procedure was carried out with our datasets for a sample of articles.

On the contrary, in our datasets, there are several occurrences of noun phrases. Therefore, the title and abstracts are text mined to extract these nouns and the phrases used by the authors to identify the main research fields. This was achieved when the data were analyzed (Waltman et al. 2010) based on the links generated during the co-occurrence analysis. The bibliometric and the text mining analyses provide the main research themes, emphasizing the potential research gaps and the future aspects that can be addressed in the coming years. This summarizes that the methodology answers the related research questions. The research framework design is shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1
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The framework of research

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Sampling of the data

Systematic reviews channel the importance of well-structured scientific papers, including the publication years, citations, references, and keywords used by the authors, co-authors, countries, and organizations involved in structuring the literature. (Chowdhury et al. 2021, Zahedi et al. 2016). Based on this ideology, aerosol and precipitation were identified as the two concepts for creating the structure for the review. Secondary keywords like the combination of aerosol with respect to aerosol optical depth (AOD), humidity, temperature, and precipitation were used to extract more relevant articles from the Web of Science databases. The research seeks to cover all the streams related to aerosols, hence the search was not limited, the articles covered all the areas that have ever been on the Web of Science. The search string with keywords was extracted by title and abstracts of the articles in the Web of Science database. The download articles were 23,546 including all reviews and articles published during 2002 to 2022, non-English materials were not included. Table 1 summarizes the collection process of the data.

Table 1 Process of data sampling for VOSviewer
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Analysing the sampled data

Scientific mapping is an extensive area of study where statistical tools evaluate performance broadly, and bibliometric analysis is one of the statistically prominent tools. Potential and effective scrutiny of links based on the journals, keywords, citations, and co-citations networks (Feng et al. 2017), provides insight to the scientists and researchers to come across current trends and future aspects of research. The software used for this research is VOSviewer. VOSviewer is a software tool to analyze and visualize bibliometric data in order to understand the trends, domains, hotspots, and themes of a particular study; VOS means ‘visualization of similarities’ (Van Eck and Waltman 2010). VOSviewer inherits the smart local moving algorithm introduced by Waltman and Van Eck (2013). The limitation of VOSviewer observed in our datasets is the complex functionality that is restricted to manage large datasets and is less interactive.

Results and discussion

The section below gives the results from the text mining and the bibliometric analysis. This fills the first and second research questions.

Bibliometric indicators

Spatial and geographical distribution of the articles

The distribution of articles is based on the activities of the published articles that are geographically situated across the countries. These spatial distributions of the articles are in the research context, including aerosol and precipitation from 2002 to 2022. Our analysis accounts for 144 countries that have researched in the following field of aerosol and precipitation and 100 countries which are in a collective network for co-authorships. Figure 2 provides a pictorial representation of the co-authorship network based on the research that includes aerosol and precipitation. The nodes and the size of nodes signify the number of articles, a country publishes. The thickness of the link illustrates the potential co-authorship between each country. Table 2 lists the top 10 countries with the number of articles published. The number of links indicates the collaborating countries and the total link strength indicates the entire number of the co-authored with the citations of their articles.

Fig. 2
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The co-authorship network is based on countries for research related to aerosol and precipitation

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Table 2 The top 10 countries with number of co-authorships, co-author countries and the total number of citations of their research articles
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Table 2 has categorized values of the collaborations, co-authorships, citations, and published documents from the top 10 countries working in aerosols in the context of precipitation. The USA ranks first in all four categories with 8486 articles, 323,157 citations, 94 collaborating links with other counties, and 7714 co-authorships. China has been marked second in the categories with published articles with 6087, total citations of 130,378, and 6087 co-authorships. England has secured second place with 85 co-author countries. Germany ranks third in all four categories with 2342 articles, 85,291 citations with 4180 co-authorships, and 82 co-author collaboration links. India, France, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Italy, and Switzerland also appear in the top countries contributing to the following field. These link strengths interpret the collaborations among each country. Figure 2 displays that the USA has the most collaborations with 94 co-authorship countries, it has the most collaboration with China (1447 co-authorship), Germany (691 co-authorship), and England (620 co-authorship). These countries also have the strongest links in the networks among themselves and other countries.

The most productive and influential authors

Researchers, especially in the academic field, have a prior role in development (Guo et al. 2021). The author with the highest number of articles is identified as the most productive author by the software, similarly, the author who has the most citations in our dataset is termed the most influential author. From our dataset, there are 638,887 contributing authors to the field of aerosol and precipitations, among them 4954 authors have contributed at least 5 articles. Table 3 and Table 4 list the authors with the most articles and citations respectively, doing so we interpret the author’s productivity and influence with the total number of co-authors and co-authorship. According to our data, Zhanqing Li is the most productive and influential author with 117 articles and 5604 citations.

Table 3 Top 10 highly productive authors contributed in the domain of aerosols and precipitation
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Table 4 Top 10 highly influential authors in the domain of aerosol and precipitation
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The influential and productive core journal

Two thousand six hundred fifty-four articles have been published in 570 journals related to aerosols and precipitation. To scrutinize our dataset, we have considered only those journals that had at least 5 articles published. Figure 3 and Fig. 4 represent the top journals based on the number of articles published and citations to their articles. From these figures, the Journal of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics ranks first with the most published articles, i.e., 2415, and the most cited articles with 93,689 citations. The Journal of Geophysical Research (1633 published articles, 73,242 citations) and the atmospheric environment (1633 published articles, and 47,224 citations), hold the second and third productive and influential journals. There is a significant gap between the remaining journals based on their published articles and citations. Based on the retrieved data from 2002 to 2022, it is evident that these are considered to be the most influential and productive journals, as they contributed to publishing research related to aerosols and precipitations.

Fig. 3
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The top 10 most productive journals in reference to the articles published

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The top 10 most influential journals in reference to the articles cited

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Articles

This section delivers two main analyses. Based on article citations and their bibliographic coupling.

Influential articles in the research area of aerosol and precipitation

Among various approaches, evaluating the numerous times an article has been cited related to a particular domain of research would result in interpreting the influence of an article (Merigó et al. 2015). Likewise, Table 5 lists the top 10 most cited articles on the research of aerosol and precipitation. The most influential article in our dataset is with citation of 2160, research conducted by Ramanathan and Carmichael (2008) that has focused on the regional distribution based on the high absorption combination aligned with the solar irradiance and the intermixing of the aerosols with the emitted black carbons article causing the melting of glaciers and snowpacks which can eventually affect the hydrological cycle. Similarly, the second most influential article with 1372 citations is based on the importance of aerosol interference in public health, climate, and the biosphere. The research mostly studies the quantification and the identification of biological particles and carbonaceous compounds by fine particles in the ambient air, and how these airborne solid and liquid particles would affect the hydrological cycle and atmospheric circulation Pöschl (2005). These articles mainly focus on how the climate and health would be affected when these aerosols interact with pollutants, especially fine particulate matter. The third article with 1109 citations by Levy et al. (2013), was based on introducing the algorithm that would use MODIS-observed Spectral reflectance to retrieve aerosol optical depth and aerosol size parameters, reduction of the gap coverage, and location-specific (Land and Sea) for better visualizations. The retrieval methods would enhance the studies that require information regarding clouds and aerosols at 3 km resolution. The studies comparing climate-forcing agents responsible for climate change use a global climate model to analyze the effectiveness. Hansen et al. (2005) research provides insights on anthropogenic tropospheric O3 and Black Carbon (BC) snow albedo effect cause instant warming and sea ice loss in the Arctic, the study also evidences the interference of the greenhouse that could increase the Hadley circulation in the models that could cause increase rainfalls in the intertropical convergence zones and Easter parts of the continents, and other model simulations are discussed in this research article. Other articles that secure a fifth (801 citations), sixth (726 citations), seventh (696 citations), and tenth rank (652 citations) contribute to retrievals (levy et al. 2010), modeling studies based on simulation (Ervens et al. 2011), and parameterizations of aerosols-cloud properties based on their characteristics like the global coupled model (Donner et al. 2011). Introducing aerosol-climate modeling system ECHAM5-HAM, for malleable microphysical approach for wide studies related to climate regimes (Stier et al. 2005). The research related to understanding the effects of aerosols on clouds and atmospheres and health impacts made the articles by Després et al. (2012) and Stevens and Feingold (2009) rank the eighth and ninth most influential articles with 674 and 673 citations in our datasets. The Journal of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics has three articles that appear influential in arena of precipitation and aerosols.

Table 5 The top 10 highly cited research in the domain of aerosol and precipitation
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Additionally, the Journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics is considered a pre-eminent journal with three of its articles in the top 10 spots securing its status as the most productive and most influential journal.

Bibliographic coupling of articles

The bibliographic coupling is exercised to categorize relevant themes under aerosol and precipitations based on their shared references. To understand the entire research from our data set we set at least one common reference from 23,546 articles (research and reviews) which gave us 20,469 published articles to scrutinize the themes. Figure 5 gives the pictorial representation of the articles clubbed in 4 specific clusters. The clusters are differentiated by the colors that symbolize different themes. Each cluster has similar references which makes one know a similar type of research is found in that particular cluster. The size of each bubble interprets as the total number of citations of the corresponding articles, and the links between each bubble define the article’s co-occurrences. The top 10 most cited articles of each category are listed in Tables 6, 7, 8, 9.

Fig. 5
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Distribution of the group of clusters based on their category

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Table 6 Highly cited articles from the Red clusters
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Table 7 Highly cited articles from the BLUE clusters
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Table 8 Highly citied articles from the green cluster
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Table 9 Highly citied articles from the yellow clusters
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The articles under red clusters majorly focus on the retrieval of aerosol optical depth (AOD) using sensors (Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer), based on spectral reflectance over different surface types for better visualization and to provide advanced information on clouds and the interactions with the aerosols (Levy et al. 2013; Remer et al. 2008). Further research in this category is based on advancements in comparative studies, categorical analysis using Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Application-version 2, Goddard Earth Observing System-version 5, Aerosol Robotic Network, etc., to assimilate the AOD from location-specific platforms like the ground or remote sensing for initial evaluation of the AOD fields, study the aerosol emissions (Levy et al. 2010, Sayer et al. 2014, Randles et al. 2017). Table 6 listed the highly cited article from the red clusters.

The blue category has been categorized as the studies related to aerosol characteristics, based on physical and chemical characteristics, reactivity, and mobility analysis for various climatological parameters and regional conditions (Eck et al. 2005; Singh et al. 2004; Ramanathan et al. 2007; Dey et al. 2004; Che et al. 2014). Green clusters have a combination of impacts and analysis studies, which involve depositions of black carbons, anthropogenic pollutants, and particulate matters that would affect the hydrological cycle, the interference of solar radiance involving absorption, and cause heating at high elevations. The contribution of the biogenic, greenhouse and reactive trace gases would cause environmental and health effects when they are exposed to aerosols of a particular size, structure, concentrations, and chemical compositions (Pöschl 2005, Ramanathan and Carmichael 2008, Yu et al. 2006, Stevens and Feingold 2009, Ervens et al. 2011). The fourth category is the group of yellow clusters; their main focus is on the effectiveness of the climate models when exposed to biomass burnings, particulate organic matter, mineral dust, and other global aerosol compounds (Stier et al. 2005). General circulation models (CM3), ECHAM5-HAM (aerosol-climate modeling system), atmospheric models and other such models are developed to understand the aerosols (types of aerosols, i.e., biological aerosol particles etc.) clouds interaction and climate variabilities caused by emerging issues of pollutions and global warming (Després et al. 2012, Donner et al. 2011, Hunees et al. 2011) are some related and highly cited works from this category.

Keyword analysis to derive hotspots from the research domain

A keyword analysis is considered to understand research domains, i.e., research tendencies and the most active hotspots from the collected data. The initial analysis extracted 46,012 keywords; of which 28,212 keywords were scrutinized after data cleaning. The relevant keywords, i.e., 6107 have been retrieved by selecting keywords with at least 5 occurrences, and visualized in the heat map, as seen in Fig. 6. The following area is where the current focus draws aerosol as the most frequently used keyword with 2059 frequencies. Particulate matter and Aerosol Optical Depth are ranked as the second and the third most occurred keywords, whereas precipitation keywords ranked fifth on the list with 382 frequencies. In order to ease the identification of the most occurred author keyword with 230 occurrences, they are listed in Tables 10 and 11.

Fig. 6
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The density visualization map of author keywords from our dataset in the domain of aerosol and precipitation

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Table 10 The most frequently used author keywords in the research area of aerosol and precipitation
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Table 11 The most frequent pairs from the author keywords taken in account Aerosol as the pivotal keyword
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Compared to the rest of the keywords, “Aerosol” has a higher frequency of 2059 occurrences and has the most co-occurrences with other keywords. As formulated in Table 8, Aerosol has a strong focus and collaborates with MODIS, LiDAR, Remote sensing, and Precipitation in author keyword lists of 124,109,102, and 95 articles, respectively. A clearer visual is obtained when the most frequently occurring pairs ignore the keyword “Aerosol”. Table 6 provides the most occurring pairs excluding the keyword “aerosol”. Aerosol Optical Depth and MODIS, and also, Aerosol Optical Depth and Particulate matter are the most frequently occurring pairs with 410 and 280 occurrences. AERONET and Aerosol Optical Depth is ranked the third most frequently occurred pair of keywords, followed by other top ten pairs (Table 12).

Table 12 The most frequent pairs from the author’s keywords excluding Aerosol
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Text mining analyses: sectoral conceptualization

Text mining analyses are done only with abstracts and the title of the articles, Fig. 7 is extracted without cleaning the repetition and pronouns whereas, Fig. 8 clearly clusters the major themes. The first cluster represents the retrieval of aerosols considering the Aerosol Optical Depth using remote sensing, the following cluster also reflects the mechanism, sampling studies, and spectroscopy absorption and reflectance studies related to aerosols. The major studies contributing to this cluster is the use of Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensors. The Collection 6 (C6) algorithm is introduced to retrieve the aerosol size parameters and aerosol optical depth over various surface types. Based on this characterization studies on the residual biases that are observed like geometry, surface properties, and comparative studies related to the validation of approaches either by assumptions or certainty (Levy et al. 2010, Levy et al. 2013). This research theme also has reviews and research articles under comparison studies on several reanalysis systems based on their upgradation, i.e., Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, version 2 (MERRA-2), Goddard Earth Observing System, version 5 (GEOS-5), Integrated Earth System Analysis (IESA), prognostic model coupled to GOCART aerosol module. With the above references and observations, we understand that there is a need for precise evaluation, validation and simulation to understand the assimilation of the aerosol emission and their interaction with the climate (Randles et al. 2017), as retrieval methods are yet to find the accurate precision for sampling. Many studies are emerging daily, and the retrieval of aerosols using remote sensing is currently necessary to understand the aerosol sources, interactions, and effects on human health and climate.

Fig. 7
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Major research themes before data cleaning

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Fig. 8
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Major research themes in the field of Aerosol and precipitation

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Cluster 2 focuses on the research themes that involve the study of the characterization, effects of these aerosols by climatic variations, and, later on, human health and the environment. The pollution accumulation during dry seasons, polluted oceanic regions, brown clouds, i.e., the scattered anthropogenic aerosols that absorb the solar radiations (Ramanathan et al. 2007) are the most researched area in this cluster. Seasonal and inter-annual variability influence the aerosol optical properties in various regions, especially in urban-industrial sites. Singh et al. (2004) stated in their study that aerosol properties over Kanpur showed influential links with seasonal effects with maximum variations, i.e., during the monsoon seasons. Dust is the detrimental factor to the optical depth during premonsoons and later gets dominated by the urban aerosols during the winter and post-monsoon times.

Dust storms are the most common natural hazards affecting various levels of health. Jing and Singh (2020) studied that the concentration of particulate matter less than 10 μm was found to be increased by almost 150 μg m−3 after every dust event. With the population’s rapid growth and the activities involved in fossil fuel combustions, global climatic factors are affected due to those aerosol emissions. The latest studies included in the research theme are to study the aerosol interaction on both direct and indirect radiative force effects on droplet properties and cloud dynamics. Recent studies involve satellite remote sensing techniques that provide the global information of the aerosol optical depth in a nominal manner; the complete information on absorption and the properties are tedious to attain; hence, the requirement of precision and proper assessment of the emitted aerosols and their characterization has attracted the scientist to work in this research theme.

Cluster 3 has the overall research related to reviews based on assessments, health and environmental effects of exposure to aerosols which is in line with the previous research theme. The assessment studies are involved in the comparison studies based on the latest observational capabilities and uncertainties for the direct forcing of aerosols based on either ground-based measurements or remote sensing. There is a lack of measurement of aerosol due to the surface reflections and to overcome uncertainties, etc. Several articles have been published in this cluster, out of which Yu et al. (2006) has the most cited article in this domain. Also, there are many research that derives the importance of atmospheric chemistry, physics climate, and health. Related research is based on particulate matter and its influence on the hydrological cycle and energy balance of the Earth. Ramanathan and Carmichael (2008) and Pöschl (2005) have the most cited articles in this research area, which is based on health effects and environmental degradation caused by the composition of atmospheric aerosols; and anthropogenic sources that emit black carbon. Additionally, Li et al. (2008) and Shiraiwa et al. (2017) have experimented based on the absorption of the aerosols and secondary organic aerosols and their scattering ability, transportation, and impacts on the medium of contact causing oxidation, biodegradation, etc. These are merely some examples from the research theme in cluster 3 related to aerosol and precipitation.

Cluster 4 documents the research area that involves the modeling and comparison studies based on global climate models, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory models, General circulation models, and many more, that are modeled for atmosphere, ocean, sea ice, etc. Modeling aspects of these research are mainly focused recently as they primarily work on the basic simulation of these models that address the aerosol and the cloud interactions either based on chemical or physical interactions present in the stratosphere and troposphere. These studies also highlight the climate conditions and the predictive future of the global climate and consequences. Studies by Donner et al. (2011) and Hansen et al. (2005) have been the most citied and followed research in this domain. According to the thematic structure as mentioned in previous sections through bibliometric and text mining evaluations, the research questions were addressed.

Research gap and future direction

The outcome was to identify the research gaps for future direction in the research area of aerosol and precipitation. As highlighted by Yu et al. (2006), precise characterization and aerosol absorption remain a challenging task, and only a few articles address this kind of research, making this domain lesser addressed. Research strategies have to be well developed in terms of integration and measuring satellite observations, as this is an emerging domain for retrieval. There is a need to find verifications for a direct relationship between aerosol and precipitation since research in this hotspot is based on probabilities and scenarios. Several studies on exposure due to aerosol leading to adverse health and climate conditions are available, but all the findings remain anticipated. Lastly, aerosol and precipitation are challenging research areas that involve high-level scientific cooperation and upgraded knowledge of machine learning and remote sensing techniques.

Hence, the need to have a proper characterization for the type of aerosol since preventive measures can be taken prior to the exposure of these air pollutants. Also, the involvement of control and management studies especially for less developed countries on exposure to anthropogenic aerosols either due to municipal waste, air pollution, water pollution, and soil pollution, on human health deserves investigation in future research.

Conclusion

The study attempted to provide a comprehensive outline of aerosol in the context of precipitation by performing bibliometric and text mining analyses of 23,546 peer-reviewed journal articles from the Web of Science citation database. The outcome of the conducted analysis has led to the quantum of scientific production from the field of aerosol in the context of precipitation. The analysis has been carried out based on various indicators that mark the performance like geographical distribution of the articles, the most productive and influential authors, the most contributing journals and publications, with author keyword–based evaluation which has unravelled the research hotspots. The bibliometric coupling is performed in order to provide the 4 main clusters of research in the field of aerosol in context to precipitation which are identified as (a) Retrieval, Sample Analyses (Remote sensing and sensors), (b) Physical–Chemical Characteristics and Transportation of aerosol particles in the atmosphere, (c) Impacts of aerosols on climate and health, and (d) Simulation models, predictive models and climate models. Followed by the research domains namely, 1. Sampling and Retrieval methods, 2. Characterization and Effects 3. Assessment studies, health and environmental impacts, and 4. Modeling and Measures based on text mining on titles and abstracts of the target literature.

The insights obtained by our research would support future research to understand the research domains better and present a more precise visualization and direction for their further contribution in this field. Though there is much literature on the latest approaches, still there is a need for better bifurcation and characterization of the aerosols, their precise retrieval methods for obtaining an intelligible relationship between the aerosol and precipitation.

There are some drawbacks to this research:

  • 1. We have taken the sample data from the Web of Science database, the incorporation of other databases like Scopus would have extended more reliable information on the present and future findings.

  • 2. We have included only those documents in English; this would have caused some potentially specific studies involving aerosol and precipitation to be missing at the micro-level.

  • 3. Our search only considered the articles published from 2002 to February 2022; there would be more extensive research articles and authors prior to 2002 and after February 2022.