Abstract
Agriculture is the basis for food production on a global scale. Sustainable agriculture tries to improve or maintain the quality of food without compromising the environment. As sessile organisms, plants cannot avoid adverse environmental conditions and contact with other living organisms. The damage caused to plants by other living organisms such as parasites and pathogens (virus, bacteria, fungi, nematodes or insects) brings about what is known as biotic stress. Plants are constantly exposed to biotic stress, which causes changes in plant metabolism involving physiological damages that lead to a reduction of their productivity. To fight biotic stress, plants have developed sophisticated defense mechanisms. Thus, understanding plant defense mechanisms might prevent important crop and economic losses. In this article, a bibliometric analysis of biotic stress is carried out. Different aspects of the publications are analyzed, such as publication type, research field, journal type, countries and their institutions, as well as the keyword occurrence frequency, and finally special attention is paid to the plant studied by the leading countries and institutions. As expected, journals selected by authors to publish their relevant findings are plant-specific journals. However, it should be noted that the fourth position, in terms of the number of publications per journal, is occupied by BMC Genomics journal. Such a journal considers mainly articles on genomics, which indicates the involvement of genetic factors in the control of biotic stress. Analysis of the keywords used in publications about biotic stress shows the great interest in the biotic–abiotic stress interaction, in the gene expression regulation in plants as well as phytohormones in the current research. In short, the great effort made by the scientific community in the biotic and abiotic stresses field with the aim to understand, regulate and control plant damages caused by biotic stress agents will help in the development of sustainable agriculture.
Highlights
Agriculture faces the great challenge of providing a world population in continuous growth with food, while the natural resources remain the same [1]
A total of 5081 documents including the “Biotic Stress” term in the title, abstract or keywords were recovered from the period 1979–2016
From 1997, a constant increase in the number of documents on biotic stress has been observed until reaching 553 publications in 2016 (Figure 1). This evolution shows a slow initial growth in the number of publications while a 10% increase in reports on biotic stress is observed in the last decade
Summary
Agriculture faces the great challenge of providing a world population in continuous growth with food, while the natural resources remain the same [1]. The second level of plant immune system is carried out by plant resistance (R) proteins that recognize specific effectors from pathogens or pests (Avr proteins) and activate plant defense mechanisms in a much more effective way [16,17]. This type of resistance is named effector-triggered immunity (ETI) and often activates hypersensitive responses (HR) that include programmed cell death in infected cells and the surrounding areas [18]. The aim of this manuscript is to perform a bibliometric study on the worldwide scientific production in the research field of biotic stress in plants
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