Bibliometric Analysis of Peer Reviewed Literature on Sustainable Agriculture Research – Challenges and Prospects

Abstract

With the need to fulfil the rising food demands of the increasing population, the agriculture sector faces a huge challenge. The issue is compounded by climatic change, severe shortage of water, increasing salinity, habitat vulnerability and pollution amongst others. Considerable emphasis worldwide is focused on research aimed to sustain as well increase agricultural productivity. The present study focuses on systematically mapping the thrust areas of research related to sustainable agriculture based on search results from SCOPUS database. The retrieved data was analysed using VOS viewer application program to create network maps based on term co-occurrence analysis. The analysis further provides insight into the most active authors, countries, institutions as well as citations. A total of 12,261 documents were retrieved. A significant increase in the number of publications was seen in the last decade. The retrieved documents were contributed by authors belonging to 156 countries and had an average of 6.24 citations per document with an h-index of 40. Cluster analysis highlighted three focus areas of research- (1) sustainable agriculture (2) factors affecting crop yield and (3) basic research into plant growth, metabolism, development and aging. The underlying principle of all the research programs pertain to the use of innovative technologies and judicious use of resources for maximal production with due importance to environmental, economic and social aspects.