---
title: "Air pollution research: papers, trends and top journals"
description: "From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “air pollution” appeared in 893 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in economics (573), finance (84) and operations research (74)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/air-pollution
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/air-pollution.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “air pollution” appeared in 893 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in economics (573), finance (84) and operations research (74). (as of 2026-11-04)"
data_url: https://scholar4ai.com/data/rankings.json
updated: 2026-11-04T00:03:46+09:00
window: 2026-10-06 to 2026-11-04
source: OpenAlex (CC0)
---

# Papers on “air pollution”

Research on “air pollution” in the 480 tracked journals: papers per year and category, the journals, institutions and countries publishing it, the keywords studied with it and its most-cited papers. It is not among the most frequent keywords of the last 30 days, so this page has no list of its latest papers.

Back to the ranking: https://scholar4ai.com/rankings/keywords.md

## Key findings

- From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “air pollution” appeared in 893 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in economics (573), finance (84) and operations research (74).
- 111 of them were published in 2025, against 50 in 2017.
- Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Peking University (21), Central University of Finance and Economics (16) and Renmin University of China (16).
- The journals publishing most of them were Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (49), Energy Economics (33) and Economic Analysis and Policy (20).
- The most-cited of them is “Happiness in the air: How does a dirty sky affect mental health and subjective well-being?” (Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 2017), with 659 citations.

## Papers per year

*Papers per publication year and category*

| Category | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 (so far) |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 33 | 28 | 41 | 68 | 60 | 56 | 74 | 82 | 70 | 61 |
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | 0 | 3 | 3 | 5 | 12 | 10 | 9 | 21 | 11 | 10 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 6 | 5 | 2 | 6 | 9 | 6 | 6 | 17 | 10 | 7 |
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | 0 | 3 | 2 | 5 | 4 | 9 | 12 | 8 | 4 | 5 |
| [Statistics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/statistics.md) | 5 | 4 | 0 | 3 | 2 | 4 | 3 | 0 | 4 | 6 |
| [Management](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/management.md) | 1 | 2 | 4 | 1 | 4 | 5 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 3 |
| [Health Economics and Policy](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/health-economics-and-policy.md) | 2 | 1 | 2 | 5 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 1 | 3 | 3 |
| [Tourism and Hospitality](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/tourism-and-hospitality.md) | 0 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 2 |
| [Marketing](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/marketing.md) | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 3 |
| [Accounting](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/accounting.md) | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 0 |
| [Information Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/information-systems.md) | 1 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| [Higher Education and Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/higher-education-and-research.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| All categories | 50 | 46 | 55 | 98 | 96 | 94 | 110 | 133 | 111 | 100 |

## Where the papers come from

*Journals with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Journal | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Journal of Environmental Economics and Management](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/journal-of-environmental-economics-and-management.md) | 49 |
| 2 | [Energy Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/energy-economics.md) | 33 |
| 3 | [Economic Analysis and Policy](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/economic-analysis-and-policy.md) | 20 |
| 4 | [Environmental and Resource Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/environmental-and-resource-economics.md) | 19 |
| 5 | [China Economic Review](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/china-economic-review.md) | 17 |
| 6 | [Transport Policy](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/transport-policy.md) | 14 |
| 7 | [Journal of Development Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/journal-of-development-economics.md) | 12 |
| 8 | [Ecological Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ecological-economics.md) | 11 |
| 9 | [Structural Change and Economic Dynamics](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/structural-change-and-economic-dynamics.md) | 11 |
| 10 | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 10 |

*Institutions with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Peking University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/peking-university.md) | 21 |
| 2 | [Central University of Finance and Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/central-university-of-finance-and-economics.md) | 16 |
| 3 | [Renmin University of China](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/renmin-university-of-china.md) | 16 |
| 4 | [Shandong University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/shandong-university.md) | 14 |
| 5 | [Zhejiang University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/zhejiang-university.md) | 12 |
| 6 | [IZA - Institute of Labor Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/iza-institute-of-labor-economics.md) | 11 |
| 7 | [University of International Business and Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/university-of-international-business-and-economics.md) | 11 |
| 8 | [Southwestern University of Finance and Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/southwestern-university-of-finance-and-economics.md) | 10 |
| 9 | [Zhongnan University of Economics and Law](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/zhongnan-university-of-economics-and-law.md) | 10 |
| 10 | [Xi'an Jiaotong University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/xi-an-jiaotong-university.md) | 9 |

*Countries with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Country | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | China | 257 |
| 2 | United States | 82 |
| 3 | United Kingdom | 34 |
| 4 | Germany | 27 |
| 5 | Hong Kong | 22 |
| 6 | Spain | 18 |
| 7 | India | 17 |
| 8 | Italy | 17 |
| 9 | Australia | 16 |
| 10 | Canada | 13 |

*Keywords with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [China](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/china.md) | 113 |
| 2 | PM2.5 | 90 |
| 3 | air quality | 34 |
| 4 | [environmental regulation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/environmental-regulation.md) | 31 |
| 5 | temperature inversion | 25 |
| 6 | particulate matter | 22 |
| 7 | air quality index | 20 |
| 8 | [environmental policy](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/environmental-policy.md) | 19 |
| 9 | [CO2 emissions](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/co2-emissions.md) | 17 |

## Most-cited papers

*Most-cited papers since 2017*

| # | Citations | Per month | Title | Journal | Published | Authors |
|---:|---:|---:|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 659 | 5.7 | [Happiness in the air: How does a dirty sky affect mental health and subjective well-being?](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2017.04.001) | [Journal of Environmental Economics and Management](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/journal-of-environmental-economics-and-management.md) | 2017-04-05 | Xin Zhang, Xiaobo Zhang, Xi Chen |
| 2 | 584 | 5.0 | [Energy innovation and renewable energy consumption in the correction of air pollution levels](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2017.03.009) | [Energy Policy](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/energy-policy.md) | 2017-03-09 | Agustín Álvarez Herranz, Daniel Balsalobre‐Lorente, Muhammad Qaiser Shahbaz et al. |
| 3 | 494 | 5.9 | [Deep Air Quality Forecasting Using Hybrid Deep Learning Framework](https://doi.org/10.1109/tkde.2019.2954510) | [IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-knowledge-and-data-engineering.md) | 2019-11-20 | Shengdong Du, Tianrui Li, Yan Zhu Yang et al. |
| 4 | 460 | 6.5 | [Multi-hour and multi-site air quality index forecasting in Beijing using CNN, LSTM, CNN-LSTM, and spatiotemporal clustering](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2020.114513) | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 2020-12-24 | Rui Yan, Jiaqiang Liao, Jie Yang et al. |
| 5 | 435 | 7.6 | [The effect of air pollution on migration: Evidence from China](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2022.102833) | [Journal of Development Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/journal-of-development-economics.md) | 2022-02-02 | Shuai Chen, Paulina Oliva, Peng Zhang |

## Research ideas that follow this keyword

- [Air pollution and the quality of decisions](https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/air-pollution-and-cognition.md)

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Papers on “air pollution”. Journal and Conference Research Rankings. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/air-pollution

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-keywords-air-pollution,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Papers on “air pollution”},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/air-pollution}},
  urldate = {2026-11-04},
  note = {Journal and Conference Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).