Elsevier

European Journal of Agronomy

Volume 50, October 2013, Pages 19-28
European Journal of Agronomy

Bibliometric analysis of research activity in the “Agronomy” category from the Web of Science, 1997–2011

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eja.2013.05.002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Characterize research activity in the field of “Agronomy” in the last 15 years.

  • Study focus on “Agronomy” category from 1997 to 2011 from the Web of Science.

  • Analyze all the articles and reviews through bibliometric analysis.

  • Establish a ranking of leading countries and research centers in this field.

  • Analyze the evolution of the most important research topics.

Abstract

This bibliometric analysis aims to check the status and evolution of research activity from 1997 to 2011 within the fields of study of the category “Agronomy” of the Web of Science database. With a focus on articles and reviews, almost 88,000 publications were found (92.4% in English), of which 88% were carried out by research centers of the thirty countries with the highest production. For each article, quantitative and qualitative parameters (number of publications, international collaborations, authors, research centers, year impact factor, and number of citations per article) were analyzed, establishing rankings of countries and research centers. The study is complemented by an analysis of the evolution of the principal research topics through the study of keywords and with an analysis of the journals in the category. An increase in collaboration on all scales (authors, centers, and countries) indicates a greater globalization and structuration of the research carried out, with more complex and articulated research networks. The USA is the most important country in publication productivity with 22.5% of the total publications and thirty-five of the 100 most productive research centers. The spectacular growth in research carried out in emerging countries, such as Brazil, the People’s Republic of China, or India, challenges this leadership. In Europe, the levels of production have experienced a moderate increase, with high levels in indicators of impact and collaboration standing out.

Introduction

The boom of scientific activity in the last few years has also increased the interest of researchers and institutions in publishing their studies, resulting in an increase in investment in investigation and research by numerous countries, especially the USA and the People’s Republic of China. All of this increasing interest in scientific investigation has given a greater relevance to bibliometric analysis (Quevedo-Blasco and Lopez-Lopez, 2010). This is a helpful instrument widely applied to many things, such as book and periodical selection, evaluation of articles, other kinds of publications, and bibliographies, characteristics of subject literatures, and historical applications (Lawani, 1981). It has been used as a statistical method to analyze the distribution and characteristics of publications. So, this kind of study may help scientists in each discipline who have too many choices of journals to read and refer to and who want to know where they can publish their articles (Wang et al., 2010).

Bibliographic databases are extremely important for this kind of analysis. They provide us with many advantages with only the use of a computer. So, it is possible to access these databases, which are a compilation of information structured in an electronic support. The Web of Science (ISI, Thomson Reuters), which actually consists of seven different databases, has been selected for this study because it is an available international multidisciplinary tool that is used to combine information to access the literature of science, technology, biomedicine, and other disciplines (de Granda-Orive et al., 2011, Chirici, 2012).

There are more than 2000 publications about bibliometric analysis (articles and reviews) in the Web of Science database. This bibliometric tool analyzes a great number of specific research fields (Narotsky et al., 2012, Cao et al., 2012, Molatudi and Pouris, 2006, Willett, 2009). In this study, bibliometric techniques were used to study the category “Agronomy”. According to the Web of Science, this category covers resources on the selection, breeding, management, and post-harvest treatment of crops including crop protection and science, seed science, plant nutrition, plant and soil science, soil management and tillage, weed science, agroforestry, agroclimatology, and agricultural water management.

There are only two bibliometric studies in this category in the database of the Web of Science (Bravo-Vinaja and Sanz-Casado, 2008, Krauskopf, 2012), both quite recent, from Mexico and Chile, focused on the scientific production of these two countries. This fact makes this study important for the scientific community who work in this area since it includes the study of scientific production at an international level.

The main objective of this article is to carry out an international analysis of the state of research activity in the “Agronomy” category from 1997 to 2011, studying the evolution and the growth in the last years. In order to do this, we used an important tool with great potential: a bibliometric analysis.

It is important to set up some filters to analyze data clearly. That is why this study is focused on different quantitative parameters (number of publications, number of authors per article, and number of institutions per article) and qualitative and diffusion parameters (international collaboration percentage, year impact factor, and number of citations), establishing a ranking for the most productive countries and institutions—those with the most importance. Also, the evolution of the principal research topics is analyzed through an analysis of keywords. Finally, this study pays special attention to scientific journals from this category and the relation of these journals to the most productive countries.

Section snippets

Materials and methods

The database used for this study was the Web of Science database, which is one of the most complete and widely used databases for bibliometric analyses or literature reviews (Leydesdorff, 2012, Xu et al., 2011, Rojas-Sola and de San-Antonio-Gomez, 2010, Yang, 2012, Markusova, 2012).

First, articles and reviews were selected within the period 1997–2011, corresponding to the category “Agronomy” of the Web of Science. The study starts in the year 1997 since this is the year in which the regulation

Global evolution of the category “Agronomy” of the Web of Science

With the aim of knowing the actual state of research activity at a global level within the “Agronomy” category from Web of Science, first a wide general study was carried out. Article production in the category remained relatively stable in the first years of the period. An increase in publications then occurred after 2002. This increase is extremely pronounced between 2007 and 2009, with production coming again to a standstill in the last two years. Specifically in 1997, the present category

Conclusions

The category “Agronomy” from the Web of Science database.has experimented an irregular growth of 51% in the number of publications since 1997. Similar values of growth in related categories seem to indicate that this growth is due to general tendencies and not to a marked advance in research in said field. The increase of the impact and diffusion of research is a consequence of the growth of journals and the global number of articles, with the YIF reaching 1.46 in 2011.

English is the most used

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