Dust storms are remarkable natural phenomena. They affect many countries in the Northern Hemisphere and, as such, have become an interesting research topic. We show that nowadays China is the number one publishing country of articles related to their study. On a world scale the number of publications on this topic is increasing exponentially

Jin, Bihui

Rousseau, Ronald

English

E-LIS

 1 Dust storms   Bihui Jin1 and Ronald Rousseau2,3,4  a  1 National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences,  33 Beisihuan Xilu, Zhongguancun, Beijing, 100080, P.R. China;   E-mail: jinbh@mail.las.ac.cn  2 KHBO (Association K.U.Leuven), Industrial Sciences and Technology,  Zeedijk 101, B-8400 Oostende, Belgium  E-mail: ronald.rousseau@khbo.be  3 Hasselt University, Universitaire Campus, B-3590 Diepenbeek, Belgium 4 K.U.Leuven, Steunpunt O&O Indicatoren & Dept. MSI, Dekenstraat 2 B-3000 Leuven, Belgium     Abstract  Dust storms are remarkable natural phenomena. They affect many countries in the Northern Hemisphere and, as such, have become an interesting research topic. We show that nowadays China is the number one publishing country of articles related to their study. On a world scale the number of publications on this topic is increasing exponentially.   Keywords: dust storms, publication and citation analysis, exponential increase, China, topical h-index.     Introduction: the meteorological phenomenon of dust storms  A recent News Focus in the journal Science (Normille, 2007) discusses the recurring phenomenon of dust storms in Northeastern China, Korea and Japan. It was pointed out in this article that the economic toll in China alone is approximately 650 million US dollar (= 4.9 billion Yuan RMB), citing Wang Tao, a physical geographer based at the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in                                                  a Authors are in alphabetical order. No priority is implied.  2Lanzhou. The article then goes on describing a successful approach, lead by Jiang Gaoming from CAS, to grassland restoration in Bayinhushu, a village in Inner Mongolia.  According to Wikipedia (2008) a dust storm (or sandstorm in some contexts) is a meteorological phenomenon common in arid and semi-arid regions. It arises when a gust front passes or when the wind force exceeds the threshold value where loose sand and dust are removed from the dry surface. Particles are transported through the air, causing soil erosion in one place and deposition in another. In North China dust storms are one of the most noticeable environmental phenomena. They not only affect the living conditions in China but also in neighbouring countries. China's storms deposit dust in the Pacific while the Sahara and drylands around the Arabian peninsula are the main source of airborne dust that reaches the Northern Atlantic Ocean, playing an important role in sustaining ocean life (Mather et al., 2008). Moreover, Iran, Pakistan and India deposit dust into the Arabian Sea. Recently, poor management of the earth's drylands are increasing dust storms from desert margins and change the local and global climate. As mentioned above for the case of China, these storms have a considerable impact on the economy of the countries where the phenomenon occurs. Clearly dust storms constitute an international environmental problem in the Northern Hemisphere.  As dust storms occur more and more frequently and have a considerable economic impact we want to find out how much research is done on this phenomenon, if this research has increased over the latest years, and what the contribution of China is to the publication output about dust storms.   Data collection  As data source we used Thomson/Reuters’ Web of Science. After some preliminary searches we observed that sand storms are often discussed in relation with the planet Mars. These instances were removed leading to the search string:   (“dust storm*” OR “sand storm*”) NOT (Mars OR Martian*)  After we performed the search we found out that the phrase “sand storm” is often written as one word, namely as sandstorm. Moreover, the word ‘sand dust’ was also often used in this connection. Hence results given below are based on the revised query:  (“dust storm*” OR duststorm* OR “sand storm*” OR sandstorm* OR “sand dust”) NOT (Mars OR Martian*)  Actual data collection took place on August 6, 2007 and again on August 6, 2008. We mention our initial error because the topic h-index (Hirsch, 2005; Banks, 2006; STIMULATE-6, 2007) for the original query was 42, while for the revised  3query, yielding 122 records more) it turned out to be just one more, namely 43 (over the period 1972-2007). For the period 1972-2008 the h-index had increased to 48. The first-mentioned finding illustrates the robustness of the h-index (Rousseau, 2007; VanClay, 2007): even relatively large errors in the data collection for the calculation of the h-index have no or just a small influence on the obtained value. Of course, when time goes on and the field increases also the h-index increases.   Results: dust storms  Which countries published the most articles on dust storms and is the total number of dust storm-related articles increasing over the years? Table 1 answers the first question, while Figure 1 illustrates the results related to the second question. Clearly the field is dominated by the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Among the countries or regions occurring in this list we see mostly countries that suffer from the phenomenon of dust storms, although also some other countries such as the United Kingdom occupy a high rank.   Table 1. Countries and regions publishing the most articles  on the subject of dust storms  Rank Country or region Number of  publications 1972-2007 Number of  publications 1972-2008 Increase (%) 1 China 262 333 27.1 2 USA 266 298 12.0 3 Japan 106 120 13.2 4 South Korea 46 63 37.0 5 United Kingdom 50 53 6.0 6 Taiwan 41 50 22.0 7 Canada 35 45 28.6 8 Israel 42 44 4.8 9 Germany 36 43 19.4 10 Australia 40 41 2.5 11 France 32 35 9.4 12 India 25 31 24.0 13 Saudi Arabia 24 24 0.0 14 Russia 20 22 10.0 15 Belgium 14 15 7.1   UK (in Table 1) stands for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (after checking for collaborations). During the period August 2007 – August 2008 China  4has published 71 articles on dust storms, while the second most active country, namely the USA, has published only 32 articles during this same period (data from the WoS). During the year 2008 China has overtaken the United States in total output since 1972. Yet, South Korea and Canada had an even larger percentage increase than China. We found six articles resulting from a collaboration between Mainland China and Taiwan, two of which published during the most recent year.  As it is the case for most topics in the Web of Science the large majority of articles is published in English (98.3%). A few are published in Russian or Chinese.    Dust storms0204060801001201401 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33  Fig.1  Publications on dust storms and best fitting exponential curve   As data are rather fluctuating we show in Fig.1 three year running averages. The point 1 corresponds to 1972-1974; point 2 to 1973-1975 and point 34 to 2005-2007. The number of publications on dust storms was clearly very low till 1988-1990 (point 17), then the numbers more or less quadrupled (period 1991-2000). From the year 2001 on the phenomenon of dust storms really caught on, showing a fast increase. The complete curve can be described by the exponential equation   5= 0.15450.607 ny e   where y is the number of publications and n represent the number on the x-axis of figure 1 (R² = 0.949).   The most active institutes are shown in Table 2. Results for Beijing University were added to those of Peking University. Among these 12 institutes or universities five are situated in China. Moreover Lanzhou University, situated in a region where many dust storms occur, has the largest percentage increase in publications.   Table 2. Most active institutes in the field of dust storms   Institute 1972-2007 1972-2008 Increase (%) CHINESE ACAD SCI (China) 142 171 20.4 METEOROL RES INST (Japan) 31 33 6.5 BEIJING NORMAL UNIV (China) 29 35 20.7 LANZHOU UNIV (China) 26 35 34.6 NASA (USA) 25 28 12.0 PEKING UNIV (China) 24 27 12.5 GRIFFITH UNIV (Australia) 21 22 4.8 NOAA (USA) 20 22 10.0 NAGOYA UNIV (Japan) 19 20 5.3 TEL AVIV UNIV (Israel) 18 19 5.6 UNIV WASHINGTON (USA) 18 19 5.6 CHINA METEOROL ADM (China) 16 21 31.3   Journals publishing the most articles on this topic are presented in Table 3.       6 Table 3. Journals publishing the most articles related to dust storms  JOURNAL 1972-2007 1972-2008 ATMOSPHERIC ENVIRONMENT 102 121 JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH-ATMOSPHERES 97 110 GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS 36 41 CHINESE SCIENCE BULLETIN 22 24 JOURNAL OF ARID ENVIRONMENTS 19 23 ATMOSPHERIC ENVIRONMENT PART A-GENERAL TOPICS 17 17 JOURNAL OF THE METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY OF JAPAN 17 18 GLOBAL AND PLANETARY CHANGE 14 17  We further mention that Nature published five articles, PNAS three and, surprisingly the journal Science just four, among which the one that inspired us to write this contribution.  If the relative number of journals publishing y articles is denoted as f(y) then it turned out that the topic ‘dust storms’ (2007 data) yields a perfect Lotka distribution (negative power law) :  = 2.110.645( )f y y   Fitting has been done using LOTKA, a program freely available on the Internet (Rousseau & Rousseau, 2000). This fit is accepted at any reasonable level.   Finally, Table 4 shows the top-10 Thomsom/Reuters categories in which these publications were placed (more precisely: the journals in which these articles were published). Recall that a journal may belong to more than one category.                7Table 4. Subject categories in which articles related to dust storms are published  Subject category 1972-2007 1972-2008 METEOROLOGY & ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES 362 419 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES 261 311 GEOSCIENCES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY 162 183 GEOGRAPHY, PHYSICAL 61 69 MULTIDISCIPLINARY SCIENCES 56 60 ENGINEERING, ELECTRICAL & ELECTRONIC 37 39 WATER RESOURCES 29 34 OCEANOGRAPHY 28 30 ECOLOGY 27 33 GEOCHEMISTRY & GEOPHYSICS 26 34  We next perform a test to find out if China and the United states have different specializations within the topic of dust storms. We consider the top-3 categories of Table 4 and perform a test on independence using the technique of contingency tables (Egghe & Rousseau, 1990; section I.3.5.3).  Table 5. Contingency table (based on 2007 data)   China USA other countries meteorology 106 126 289 environmental sciences 83 77 192 geosciences 61 52 113  The null-hypothesis of independent classifications is not rejected (p = 0.337). This means that we have no reason to say that China, the United States and the other countries have different preferences with respect to categories in which research on dust storms is classified.  Note  We also performed a search on the related notion of desertification*. It yielded 1544 records over the period 1972-2007, and 1716 records over the period 1972-2008. As a topic search its Hirsch indices were 50 (2007) and 54 (2008). We did not continue our research on desertification as it is actually a different topic.  Conclusion  Dust storms are one of the most noticeable environmental phenomena in the Northern Hemisphere and in particular in China. They not only affect the living conditions in China but also in neighbouring countries. Clearly dust storms  8constitute an international environmental problem and hence their study has become an important research topic. It has been shown that the number of articles related to dust storms is much lower than one may expect based on their – negative - economic impact. Yet, China, a country that suffers a lot from this phenomenon, has considerably increased its scientific activities in this field. During the last year it has overtaken the United States of America in the total number of publications since 1972. Yet, since 2001 China published more articles on dust storms on a yearly basis than any other country in the world. Maybe the fact that the 2008 Olympic Games took place in Beijing has accelerated an evolution that had been going on for some time.  Acknowledgements  Research of R. Rousseau was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC Grant No 70673019).   References  Banks, M.G. (2006). An extension of the Hirsch index: indexing scientific topics and compounds. Scientometrics, 69, 161-168. Egghe, L. and Rousseau, R. (1990). Introduction to informetrics. Quantitative methods in Library, Documentation and Information Science. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Hirsch, J.E. (2005). An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102, 16569-16572. Normille, D. (2007). Getting at the roots of killer dust storms. Science, 317, 314-316. Mather R.L., Reynolds S.E., Wolff G.A., Williams R. G., Torres-Valdes S., Woodward E. , Malcolm S., Landolfi A., Pan Xi, Sanders R., and Achterberg E. P. (2008). Phosphorus cycling in North and South Atlantic sub-tropical gyres. Nature Geoscience, 1, 439 – 443.   doi: 10.1038/ngeo232 Rousseau B. and Rousseau R. (2000). LOTKA: a program to fit a power law distribution to observed frequency data. Cybermetrics  http://www.cindoc.csic.es/cybermetrics/articles/v4i1p4.html Rousseau, R. (2007). The influence of missing publications on the Hirsch index. Journal of Informetrics, 1, 2-7. The STIMULATE-6 Group (2007). The Hirsch index applied to topics of interest to developing countries. First Monday, 12(2).  http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_2/stimulate/   Vanclay, J.K. (2007). On the robustness of the h-index. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58, 1547-1550. Wikipedia (2008) Dust storms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_storm.   

An extension of the Hirsch index: indexing scientific topics and compounds.

An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output.

Getting at the roots of killer dust storms.

Introduction to informetrics. Quantitative methods in Library, Documentation and Information Science.

Phosphorus cycling in North and South Atlantic sub-tropical gyres.

The Hirsch index applied to topics of interest to developing countries.

Dust storms

E-Lis: Research in Computing and Library and Information Science

 1
 
Dust storms 
 
 
Bihui Jin1 and Ronald Rousseau2,3,4  a 
 
1 National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences,  
33 Beisihuan Xilu, Zhongguancun, Beijing, 100080, P.R. China;   
E-mail: jinbh@mail.las.ac.cn 
 
2 KHBO (Association K.U.Leuven), Industrial Sciences and Technology,  
Zeedijk 101, B-8400 Oostende, Belgium 
 E-mail: ronald.rousseau@khbo.be 
 
3 Hasselt University, Universitaire Campus, B-3590 Diepenbeek, Belgium 
4 K.U.Leuven, Steunpunt O&O Indicatoren & Dept. MSI, Dekenstraat 2 
B-3000 Leuven, Belgium 
 
 
 
 
Abstract 
 
Dust storms are remarkable natural phenomena. They affect many countries in 
the Northern Hemisphere and, as such, have become an interesting research 
topic. We show that nowadays China is the number one publishing country of 
articles related to their study. On a world scale the number of publications on this 
topic is increasing exponentially. 
 
 
Keywords: dust storms, publication and citation analysis, exponential increase, 
China, topical h-index. 
 
 
 
 
Introduction: the meteorological phenomenon of dust storms 
 
A recent News Focus in the journal Science (Normille, 2007) discusses the 
recurring phenomenon of dust storms in Northeastern China, Korea and Japan. It 
was pointed out in this article that the economic toll in China alone is 
approximately 650 million US dollar (= 4.9 billion Yuan RMB), citing Wang Tao, a 
physical geographer based at the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and 
Engineering Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 
                                                 
a Authors are in alphabetical order. No priority is implied. 
 2
Lanzhou. The article then goes on describing a successful approach, lead by 
Jiang Gaoming from CAS, to grassland restoration in Bayinhushu, a village in 
Inner Mongolia.  
According to Wikipedia (2008) a dust storm (or sandstorm in some contexts) is a 
meteorological phenomenon common in arid and semi-arid regions. It arises 
when a gust front passes or when the wind force exceeds the threshold value 
where loose sand and dust are removed from the dry surface. Particles are 
transported through the air, causing soil erosion in one place and deposition in 
another. In North China dust storms are one of the most noticeable 
environmental phenomena. They not only affect the living conditions in China but 
also in neighbouring countries. China's storms deposit dust in the Pacific while 
the Sahara and drylands around the Arabian peninsula are the main source of 
airborne dust that reaches the Northern Atlantic Ocean, playing an important role 
in sustaining ocean life (Mather et al., 2008). Moreover, Iran, Pakistan and India 
deposit dust into the Arabian Sea. Recently, poor management of the earth's 
drylands are increasing dust storms from desert margins and change the local 
and global climate. As mentioned above for the case of China, these storms have 
a considerable impact on the economy of the countries where the phenomenon 
occurs. Clearly dust storms constitute an international environmental problem in 
the Northern Hemisphere. 
 
As dust storms occur more and more frequently and have a considerable 
economic impact we want to find out how much research is done on this 
phenomenon, if this research has increased over the latest years, and what the 
contribution of China is to the publication output about dust storms.  
 
Data collection 
 
As data source we used Thomson/Reuters’ Web of Science. After some 
preliminary searches we observed that sand storms are often discussed in 
relation with the planet Mars. These instances were removed leading to the 
search string:  
 
(“dust storm*” OR “sand storm*”) NOT (Mars OR Martian*) 
 
After we performed the search we found out that the phrase “sand storm” is often 
written as one word, namely as sandstorm. Moreover, the word ‘sand dust’ was 
also often used in this connection. Hence results given below are based on the 
revised query: 
 
(“dust storm*” OR duststorm* OR “sand storm*” OR sandstorm* OR “sand dust”) 
NOT (Mars OR Martian*) 
 
Actual data collection took place on August 6, 2007 and again on August 6, 2008. 
We mention our initial error because the topic h-index (Hirsch, 2005; Banks, 
2006; STIMULATE-6, 2007) for the original query was 42, while for the revised 
 3
query, yielding 122 records more) it turned out to be just one more, namely 43 
(over the period 1972-2007). For the period 1972-2008 the h-index had 
increased to 48. The first-mentioned finding illustrates the robustness of the h-
index (Rousseau, 2007; VanClay, 2007): even relatively large errors in the data 
collection for the calculation of the h-index have no or just a small influence on 
the obtained value. Of course, when time goes on and the field increases also 
the h-index increases. 
 
 
Results: dust storms 
 
Which countries published the most articles on dust storms and is the total 
number of dust storm-related articles increasing over the years? Table 1 answers 
the first question, while Figure 1 illustrates the results related to the second 
question. Clearly the field is dominated by the United States and the People’s 
Republic of China. Among the countries or regions occurring in this list we see 
mostly countries that suffer from the phenomenon of dust storms, although also 
some other countries such as the United Kingdom occupy a high rank. 
 
 
Table 1. Countries and regions publishing the most articles  
on the subject of dust storms 
 
Rank Country or region Number of 
 
publications 
1972-2007 
Number of 
 
publications 
1972-2008 
Increase 
(%) 
1 China 262 333 27.1 
2 USA 266 298 12.0 
3 Japan 106 120 13.2 
4 South Korea 46 63 37.0 
5 United Kingdom 50 53 6.0 
6 Taiwan 41 50 22.0 
7 Canada 35 45 28.6 
8 Israel 42 44 4.8 
9 Germany 36 43 19.4 
10 Australia 40 41 2.5 
11 France 32 35 9.4 
12 India 25 31 24.0 
13 Saudi Arabia 24 24 0.0 
14 Russia 20 22 10.0 
15 Belgium 14 15 7.1 
 
 
UK (in Table 1) stands for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (after 
checking for collaborations). During the period August 2007 – August 2008 China 
 4
has published 71 articles on dust storms, while the second most active country, 
namely the USA, has published only 32 articles during this same period (data 
from the WoS). During the year 2008 China has overtaken the United States in 
total output since 1972. Yet, South Korea and Canada had an even larger 
percentage increase than China. We found six articles resulting from a 
collaboration between Mainland China and Taiwan, two of which published 
during the most recent year. 
 
As it is the case for most topics in the Web of Science the large majority of 
articles is published in English (98.3%). A few are published in Russian or 
Chinese. 
 
 
 
Dust storms
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33
 
 
Fig.1  Publications on dust storms and best fitting exponential curve 
 
 
As data are rather fluctuating we show in Fig.1 three year running averages. The 
point 1 corresponds to 1972-1974; point 2 to 1973-1975 and point 34 to 2005-
2007. The number of publications on dust storms was clearly very low till 1988-
1990 (point 17), then the numbers more or less quadrupled (period 1991-2000). 
From the year 2001 on the phenomenon of dust storms really caught on, 
showing a fast increase. The complete curve can be described by the 
exponential equation 
 
 5
= 0.15450.607 ny e  
 
where y is the number of publications and n represent the number on the x-axis 
of figure 1 (R² = 0.949). 
 
 
The most active institutes are shown in Table 2. Results for Beijing University 
were added to those of Peking University. Among these 12 institutes or 
universities five are situated in China. Moreover Lanzhou University, situated in a 
region where many dust storms occur, has the largest percentage increase in 
publications. 
 
 
Table 2. Most active institutes in the field of dust storms 
 
 
Institute 1972-2007 1972-2008 
Increase 
(%) 
CHINESE ACAD SCI 
(China) 142 171 20.4 
METEOROL RES 
INST (Japan) 31 33 6.5 
BEIJING NORMAL 
UNIV (China) 29 35 20.7 
LANZHOU UNIV 
(China) 26 35 34.6 
NASA (USA) 25 28 12.0 
PEKING UNIV (China) 24 27 12.5 
GRIFFITH UNIV 
(Australia) 21 22 4.8 
NOAA (USA) 20 22 10.0 
NAGOYA UNIV 
(Japan) 19 20 5.3 
TEL AVIV UNIV 
(Israel) 18 19 5.6 
UNIV WASHINGTON 
(USA) 18 19 5.6 
CHINA METEOROL 
ADM (China) 16 21 31.3 
 
 
Journals publishing the most articles on this topic are presented in Table 3.  
 
 
 
 
 6
 
Table 3. Journals publishing the most articles related to dust storms 
 
JOURNAL 
1972-
2007 
1972-
2008 
ATMOSPHERIC ENVIRONMENT 102 121 
JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH-
ATMOSPHERES 97 110 
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS 36 41 
CHINESE SCIENCE BULLETIN 22 24 
JOURNAL OF ARID ENVIRONMENTS 19 23 
ATMOSPHERIC ENVIRONMENT PART A-
GENERAL TOPICS 17 17 
JOURNAL OF THE METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY 
OF JAPAN 17 18 
GLOBAL AND PLANETARY CHANGE 14 17 
 
We further mention that Nature published five articles, PNAS three and, 
surprisingly the journal Science just four, among which the one that inspired us to 
write this contribution.  If the relative number of journals publishing y articles is 
denoted as f(y) then it turned out that the topic ‘dust storms’ (2007 data) yields a 
perfect Lotka distribution (negative power law) : 
 
= 2.11
0.645( )f y
y
 
 
Fitting has been done using LOTKA, a program freely available on the Internet 
(Rousseau & Rousseau, 2000). This fit is accepted at any reasonable level.  
 
Finally, Table 4 shows the top-10 Thomsom/Reuters categories in which these 
publications were placed (more precisely: the journals in which these articles 
were published). Recall that a journal may belong to more than one category. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 7
Table 4. Subject categories in which articles related to dust storms are published 
 
Subject category 1972-
2007 
1972-
2008 
METEOROLOGY & ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES 362 419 
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES 261 311 
GEOSCIENCES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY 162 183 
GEOGRAPHY, PHYSICAL 61 69 
MULTIDISCIPLINARY SCIENCES 56 60 
ENGINEERING, ELECTRICAL & ELECTRONIC 37 39 
WATER RESOURCES 29 34 
OCEANOGRAPHY 28 30 
ECOLOGY 27 33 
GEOCHEMISTRY & GEOPHYSICS 26 34 
 
We next perform a test to find out if China and the United states have different 
specializations within the topic of dust storms. We consider the top-3 categories 
of Table 4 and perform a test on independence using the technique of 
contingency tables (Egghe & Rousseau, 1990; section I.3.5.3). 
 
Table 5. Contingency table (based on 2007 data) 
 
 China USA 
other 
countries 
meteorology 106 126 289 
environmental 
sciences 83 77 192 
geosciences 61 52 113 
 
The null-hypothesis of independent classifications is not rejected (p = 0.337). 
This means that we have no reason to say that China, the United States and the 
other countries have different preferences with respect to categories in which 
research on dust storms is classified. 
 
Note 
 
We also performed a search on the related notion of desertification*. It yielded 
1544 records over the period 1972-2007, and 1716 records over the period 1972-
2008. As a topic search its Hirsch indices were 50 (2007) and 54 (2008). We did 
not continue our research on desertification as it is actually a different topic. 
 
Conclusion 
 
Dust storms are one of the most noticeable environmental phenomena in the 
Northern Hemisphere and in particular in China. They not only affect the living 
conditions in China but also in neighbouring countries. Clearly dust storms 
 8
constitute an international environmental problem and hence their study has 
become an important research topic. It has been shown that the number of 
articles related to dust storms is much lower than one may expect based on their 
– negative - economic impact. Yet, China, a country that suffers a lot from this 
phenomenon, has considerably increased its scientific activities in this field. 
During the last year it has overtaken the United States of America in the total 
number of publications since 1972. Yet, since 2001 China published more 
articles on dust storms on a yearly basis than any other country in the world. 
Maybe the fact that the 2008 Olympic Games took place in Beijing has 
accelerated an evolution that had been going on for some time.  
Acknowledgements 
 
Research of R. Rousseau was supported by the National Natural Science 
Foundation of China (NSFC Grant No 70673019). 
 
 
References 
 
Banks, M.G. (2006). An extension of the Hirsch index: indexing scientific topics 
and compounds. Scientometrics, 69, 161-168. 
Egghe, L. and Rousseau, R. (1990). Introduction to informetrics. Quantitative 
methods in Library, Documentation and Information Science. Amsterdam: 
Elsevier. 
Hirsch, J.E. (2005). An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output. 
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of 
America, 102, 16569-16572. 
Normille, D. (2007). Getting at the roots of killer dust storms. Science, 317, 314-
316. 
Mather R.L., Reynolds S.E., Wolff G.A., Williams R. G., Torres-Valdes S., 
Woodward E. , Malcolm S., Landolfi A., Pan Xi, Sanders R., and 
Achterberg E. P. (2008). Phosphorus cycling in North and South Atlantic 
sub-tropical gyres. Nature Geoscience, 1, 439 – 443.  
 doi: 10.1038/ngeo232 
Rousseau B. and Rousseau R. (2000). LOTKA: a program to fit a power law 
distribution to observed frequency data. Cybermetrics 
 http://www.cindoc.csic.es/cybermetrics/articles/v4i1p4.html 
Rousseau, R. (2007). The influence of missing publications on the Hirsch index. 
Journal of Informetrics, 1, 2-7. 
The STIMULATE-6 Group (2007). The Hirsch index applied to topics of interest 
to developing countries. First Monday, 12(2). 
 http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_2/stimulate/   
Vanclay, J.K. (2007). On the robustness of the h-index. Journal of the American 
Society for Information Science and Technology, 58, 1547-1550. 
Wikipedia (2008) Dust storms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_storm.   


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Dust storms

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