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Review

Exploring Biblioshiny for Historical Assessment of Global Research on Sustainable Use of Water in Agriculture

by
Ejovi Akpojevwe Abafe
,
Yonas T. Bahta
and
Henry Jordaan
*
Department of Agricultural Economics, University of the Free State, P.O. Box 339, Bloemfontein 9300, South Africa
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sustainability 2022, 14(17), 10651; https://doi.org/10.3390/su141710651
Submission received: 3 August 2022 / Revised: 15 August 2022 / Accepted: 22 August 2022 / Published: 26 August 2022
(This article belongs to the Section Sustainable Water Management)
Browse Figures
Review Reports Versions Notes

Abstract

:
There are quite a lot of studies from global and regional perspectives that touch on sustainable water use in agriculture. As a result, we explored Biblioshiny to review the scholarly research on the sustainable use of water in agriculture. Using data analysis and visualization technique of 4106 documents authored by 12,686 scholars in 724 journals published between 1990 and 2022, we find that research on this topic gained momentum in 2007 and has followed a steady increase with an annual growth rate of ~16.12%. The results of the co-occurrence network mappings highlight five trendy topics in research on sustainable water use in agriculture, which were categorized based on five (5) Word Minimum Frequency and Number of Words per Year. These topics include the AquaCrop model, Agroforestry, Biochar, No-tillage, and Diet. While renowned journals such as Agricultural Water Management, followed by Sustainability and Water, have taken leading roles in pushing research on sustainable water use in agriculture. Regarding the impact of perspective, in terms of institutional affiliation and countries, we found that the top three most prominent affiliated institutions producing publications allied to research on the sustainable use of water in agriculture are Northwest A&F University in Xianyang, China, China Agricultural University, and Hohai University in Nanjing, China, while the top three countries are China, the USA, and Australia, accounting for 45,039 (43.4%) of the total 103,900 global citations. The study’s findings can be helpful to scholars in presenting an overview of the literature on the sustainable use of water in agriculture.

1. Introduction

Quite a handful of studies on environmental sustainability turned up after the 1987 Bruntland report (Commission mondiale sur l’environnement et le développement, 1991), but since the emergence of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals [1], there has been an explosion of research from different regions globally and disciplinary perspectives, with ample evidence that water security is critical if we are ever to achieve the 2015 United Nations Global Goals of planetary sustainability. Nowadays, the priorities of global-scale sustainability initiatives are only construed when they are intimately linked to quantifiable field results. For this reason, [2] appropriate present-day sustainability studies to serve as a valuable starting point for sectoral research, such as sustainable water use in agriculture. So why is the sustainability of farm water use, otherwise known as agricultural water use, so important?
The answer traces its provenance at least to its vital role in food security and as a critical component for agricultural production, with numerous applications, spanning mainly irrigation, livestock sustenance, aquaculture, pesticide, and fertilizer application [3], as well as along the value chain, including food processing and preservation [4]. Water is vital for everyday domestic uses, including cooking, drinking, and hygiene [5,6]. As [7] emphasizes, the influential role of water in human and physical development and its innate relevance in sanitation, health, and poverty reduction cannot be overstated. However, estimates range widely, centering on the calculation that roughly 160% of the world’s available water volume will be needed to meet global water demands by 2030 [8,9], with an increasing number of regions (47% of the world’s population) being exposed to immense and higher water pressure [10,11].
The water use literature outlines a number of core drivers underpinning global water demands and pressures. However, the greatest persistent unifying element in issues presented by global and regional scale research on water sustainability has a shared denominator: agricultural pressure on available global water emanating not just from livestock and cropping operations, but also including aquaculture, triggering increased expansion and intensification to satisfy the increased demand for food owing to the rising population and rapidly changing diet, including a higher intake of animal-based foods [12,13]. For example, global crop production has surged exponentially, mainly due to the continual expansion of agricultural land, with irrigation playing a critical role in enhancing crop productivity and improving rural livelihoods. Empirical evidence suggests that irrigated agriculture accounts for 20% of all farmed land and contributes 40% of food produced globally [14]. Following [15], irrigated agriculture is the world’s top user of freshwater, responsible for nearly 70% of total use. But irrigated agriculture is also twice as productive per land unit compared to rainfed agriculture, permitting greater production intensification and crop diversification. Yet, the widespread demand for irrigation, excessive subsidies, and lax regulation is exerting undue pressure on freshwater resources. As the demand for water climbs higher than traditional sources of supply (water demand in ~80 countries already exceeds supply), many nations around the globe are experiencing water stress and scarcities [9,16,17], sparking conceptual and empirical debates regarding agricultural water sustainability for future global food security, since achieving global food security will be unattainable if agricultural water use is unsustainable [16].
Because freshwater has long been a critical pillar of food production, it is evident that the water demand for feeding the world’s future population would be enormous. Unfortunately, these demands will have to be met in an era where the fresh water available for agriculture (72%) is decreasing [17], and severe issues (i.e., extreme weather events, climate change, increased population, pollution, etc.) threaten its sustainability. Reference [18] likened the effect to the COVID-19-induced economic downturn in the worst-affected economies between 2020 and 2021, but noting that for water issues, the consequences would perhaps linger longer. While these would mainly affect water quantity, as per the emphasis of most of the available literature on water security, various issues lurk just beneath the surface of the water quality delivered to agriculture. Reference [19] summarizes major considerations, either explicitly or implicitly, that have contributed to and may continue to plague the availability of high-quality agricultural water in various countries around the globe. They describe these in terms of (i) increased cropping intensity on already farmed lands utilizing more water per unit area cultivated—in other words, vertical expansion of irrigated agriculture, resulting in land degradation and related water resource depletion in certain regions; (ii) inherited water scarcity in some regions due to their geographic position, where rainfall is rather low, groundwater use is not viable owing to economic, political, and technical factors—placing water treatment options on economic restrictions and mobility of good-quality water from other areas is not plausible; (iii) increased domestic and industrial use of quality water—thanks to population growth aided by higher household living standards and, as the global population of approximately six billion people is expected to grow by 25–80 % over the next 50 years. Meanwhile a majority of anticipated global population growth is likely to occur in Third World Nations, which are already faced with health, water, and food crises; (iv) horizontal expansion of irrigated agriculture, including the cultivation of crops in new areas requiring more water. Expansion of this nature deteriorates surface- and groundwater quality, particularly in regions where marginal lands are cultivated without efficient management mechanisms; and (v) contamination of ground and surface water resources by a myriad of point and non-point pollutants. Therefore, the extant literature on agricultural water use must urgently be used to generate policies regarding water sustainability.
The impulse to action is all-time high, and varied techniques and models have been deployed to assess water resource sustainability. A range of structural factors that can promote water sustainability has been described in the literature. Some are targeted at the household level, while others are geared toward communal, regional, national, and global scales. For this reason, authors such as in [13] and [20] argued that understanding the influence of food production and population-level dietary preferences on water use is vital for sustainable water management and, in this instance, identifying sustainable diets (i.e., complete reduction of animal source foods) that promote human health and minimize environmental impacts is thus extremely warranted. Yet, reducing the amount of animal-based food in people’s diets does not necessarily equate to less water use, especially if animal-based food is substituted with plant-based food such as pulses and fruits, which are more irrigation-dependent [21]. References [8,22] seized on treated household wastewater reuse to make the case for ensuring water sustainability, a perfect candidate for agricultural water use—partly due to its potential innate nutrient for plant growth. Although this mechanism has enjoyed some prominence wholly or—in many regions (arid and semi-arid) around the globe (for example, Africa, Southern Europe, Southern Asia, and Central America) [23]—caveats exist in the literature regarding the complexity of estimating its future contribution to overall water resources [8]; the proof, however, is at best tentative rather than definitive given the limited academic evidence.
Reference [19] promoted the adoption of sustainable water resource management options and made a case for global, regional, and site-specific strategic options that entail; (a) understanding the essence of “virtual water” and its promising use as a global remedy to regional deficits, i.e., water-deficit countries could well import a portion of food crops or other commodities that demand more water and export those that require less water in production; (b) enhancing existing agricultural water use behaviors and conservation efficiencies, both in irrigated and rain-fed agriculture, i.e., to produce more with the existing resources; (c) re-use of saline and/or sodic drainage waters via blended, cyclic, or sequential methods for crop production systems [22], and (d) adoption of efficient, economical, and ecologically compatible methods for the remediation of polluted waters [19].
The authors of [24], discussing the environmental efficiency of agricultural water use, explored the Luenberger Productivity Indicator proposed by [25] and uncovered proof that supports that measuring tradeoffs between economic benefits of agricultural water use and its environmental pressures can help design regulatory frameworks for sustainable water resource management. Correspondingly, [9] finds evidence that quantifying the ideation of ‘sustainable water development’ based on ideas from the original conception of sustainable development and industrial ecology, which ensures that increased water consumption is associated with economic and social development, and could aid policymakers and industry leaders in pursuing sustainable water policies. These studies focus on eco-efficiency, ensuring that resource efficiency is complemented by economic and social progress.
Other earlier attempts spotted in the farm water literature often relied on global hydrological models for their measurements in ensuring water sustainability. The key features of these models are that global water resources are affected not only by climate change but also by direct human influence, but selecting a global hydrological model increases the uncertainty (model specific result) of hydrological changes; thus, a multimodel approach is better suited for impact modeling studies [26]. Reference [27] reviews this assertion and the distinction between several global hydrological models and present empirical evidence on direct human impacts on the water cycle in some regions such as parts of Asia and the western United States. This strategy can work on both intragenerational and intergenerational time spans regarding global water availability and consumption, mirroring the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISI-MIP) [28] and Water Model Intercomparison Project (WaterMIP) within the European Union Water and Global Change (EU WATCH) project [29,30,31]. Thus, [27] underline the importance of accounting for anthropogenic water consumption in locations where direct human intervention is significant and areas where water consumption causes severe changes in land surface water fluxes. Singh (2014) [32] discusses other water sustainability methods that combine simulation-optimization modeling for multi-objective problems suitable for the conjunctive use management and planning of ground- and surface-water resources for sustainable irrigated agriculture. However, instead of a single optimal solution, this resulted in a set of compromised solutions.
There are quite a lot of other studies—from global to regional outlooks—that touch on water sustainability regarding agriculture. In fact, the primary issues of the prevailing research attention on sustainable agricultural water use remain proper water resource allocation, analyzing vulnerability to natural catastrophes and other disasters, evaluating climate change impacts on water schemes, and management optimization [2,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39]. While the drive for sustainable agricultural water use is clearly warranted, the crucial question is, “how has sustainable agricultural water use research progressed over time?” Thus, this article explores Biblioshiny for bibliometric analysis to assess the current literature on the evolution of studies on sustainable use of water in agriculture, identifying which of the literature perspectives have witnessed the most attention and where future research areas might be directed. Similar to our study, [40] covered sustainable agricultural water use research using the Scopus database, yet our article selection database is dissimilar, and our article identification queries and indicators are much broader. Although they identified top authors, articles, journals, and methodologies used within their survey, even so, the outcome of our study differs considerably.
In general, the study sought to present a review of scholarly publications in research on sustainable water use in agriculture over the previous decades, from 1990 to 2022. Thus, the following research questions are therefore addressed in this study:
  • How did research on sustainable water use in agriculture evolve intellectually between 1990 and 2022, measured by publications and citations?
  • Who are the worldwide research’s prominent institutions, nations, and authors?
  • Which journals and papers have the greatest impact?
  • Which publications have received the most citation or influence?
  • What are the research collaboration and authorship patterns?
  • What topics (trendy topics, keywords, keywords pluses, and themes) are associated with this research field?
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. The materials and methods are briefly described in Section 2, followed by the results and discussion in Section 3, and finally, the conclusions are detailed in Section 4.

2. Materials and Methods

Recent decades have seen a rise in scientific study. As a result, keeping track of relevant publications in one domain is becoming more and more of a bottleneck. This necessitates the development of quantitative bibliometric approaches capable of dealing with such a large amount of data, filtering out the most important works by assessing their influence and revealing the field’s underlying structure [41]. We evoked the bibliometric technique introduced by Garfield & Sher (1963) [42] to identify trends and core drivers of the published work on sustainable agricultural water use. As Zupic & Čater (2015) [43] noted, bibliometric techniques use a quantitative approach to describe, evaluate, and monitor published research to provide a systematic, transparent, and reproducible review process, thereby enhancing review quality. It is a valuable technique used by scholars to base their inference on aggregated bibliographic data from other scientists in the field who communicate their viewpoints through writing, citation, and collaboration. Compared to agricultural water use research, the bibliometrics technique has enjoyed widespread application in management, nutrition, engineering, energy, biology, and medicine. As a result, we explored the Web of Science (WOS) database, using a Boolean search to retrieve relevant literature published between 1990 and 2022.
The research team used published research, keyword analysis of single databases, and their prior understanding of the subject to determine the keywords for the current study. The search queries include (TITLE-ABS-KEY (“water use” OR “water-use” OR “use of water”); AND TITLE-ABS-KEY (sustainability OR sustainable); AND TITLE-ABS-KEY (irrigation OR agricultur* OR farm* OR crop* OR agroecosystem)), with the largest period allowed in the database to cover all potential articles. Documents from this database was filtered to extract the essentials, then imported into biblioshiny, a web interface for bibliometrix developed by [43]. For the sake of estimation subtleties, only articles and reviews published in the English language were examined, considering the most reliable scholarly contributions to the knowledge base under investigation, and the results were sorted by citation count, resulting in 4106 samples. The method comprises performance analysis and science mapping [44]. Performance analysis examines publications in terms of authors, countries, and institutes. In contrast, science mapping employs bibliometric tools to identify trends in scientific research. Both add quantitative rigor to the subjective literature evaluation and provide evidence of theoretically defined categories in review articles [41]. Specifically, we analyzed the following indicators: (i) overview, consisting the main information, annual scientific production, average citations per year and three-field plot; (ii) sources, including most relevant sources, most local cited sources, Bradford’s law, source impact, and source dynamics; (iiia) authors, covering most relevant authors, most local cited authors, authors’ production over time, Lotka’s law, author impact; (iiib) most relevant affiliations and affiliation production over time; (iiic) countries, corresponding author’s country, country scientific production, countries production over time and most cited countries; (iv) documents, including most globally cited documents, most locally cited documents, most locally cited reference, reference spectroscopy, most frequent words, wordcloud, treemap, word dynamics, and trendy topics; (v) clustering by coupling; (vi) conceptual structure, such as co-occurrence network, thematic map, thematic evolution, and factorial analysis.

3. Results

3.1. Descriptive Analysis

Table 1 presents the summary statistics of the bibliometric metadata—the published records comprised 12,686 authors and 4106 documents rising from 7 in 1991 to 459 in 2022, with an average yearly publication of 3.22, average annual citation of 14.4, and a mean citation of 3.4 per year per document, respectively. Remarkably, publications on this topic gained momentum in 2007 and have followed a steady increase with an annual growth rate of ~16.12%. Within this timeframe, 3565 articles were published, representing approximately 83 percent of all published articles. In recent years, the sustainable use of water in agriculture has become a serious concern, particularly owing to the stress placed on the natural system. Thus, the rise in peer-reviewed publications indicates a global field of research with impacts relevant to scientists and stakeholders. See Figure 1a,b for the distribution of annual scientific publications and average article citation per year. It is worth noting that 2021 had the highest productivity, with 200 units, representing 30% of the total.

3.2. Most Influential Journals

We seized on the Bradford Law of Scattering, which quantifies the relationship between journals and papers published [45]. It argues that only a limited number of core journals will provide the nucleus of papers on a given topic, accounting for a significant percentage (1/3) of publications, followed by a second, more extensive group of journals accounting for another third and a far wider group accounting for the remaining third. As a result, three clusters were found based on the cumulative frequency of citations and publications, comprising 724 journals. Based on Bradford’s law, the most salient cluster consists of 13 journals covering 1303 articles, with the second cluster having 81 journals covering 1394 articles, and the third cluster containing 628 sources spanning 1409 articles. Figure 2 shows nuclear zone 1, consisting of the 13 most productive journals.
As indicated in Table 2, the first cluster (nuclear zone) has 1303 publications (13 highly productive journals) highly productive papers with a higher cumulative frequency of citations/publications than other clusters. Of these 13 journals, Agricultural Water Management followed by Sustainability and Water were found to have the highest productivity. Consequently, if a scholar subscribes to or perhaps reads 9.57 percent (of the 13 journals), they will have met one-third (1/3) of the information requisites for the field study on sustainable agricultural water use. Figure 2 represents cluster 1 ranked according to the Hirsch index (H-index), which measures the publications’ productivity and citation impact. The index highlights an author’s performance in a specific area; however, other authors have widely applied it in various domains to examine the impact factor of sources. Hence if applied to a journal, it could be considered a journal performance factor, which can help in determining the journal’s significance.
Figure 3a–e present the most relevant top 13 journals by citation, impact, and the number of publications based on the H-index, which are: Agricultural Water Management, Field Crops Research, Journal Of Cleaner Production, Science Of The Total Environment, Water Resource Management, Soil/& Tillage Research, Journal Of Hydrology, Agricultural Systems, European Journal Of Agronomy, Agriculture Ecosystems\& Environment, Journal Of Environment Management, Environment Management, Environment Research Letters and Frontiers In Plant Science. Notice how Agricultural Water Management in Figure 3b–d retained its first position regarding most relevant sources, source local impact by G—index, and source local impact by total citations (TC) index. Considering journals publications quality based on most local cited sources (LCS) as presented in Figure 3e, Agricultural Water Management (9887), Field Crop Research (4758), and Agronomy Journal (3121) are the three most influential sources.

3.3. Authors

A total of 12,686 authors contributed 4106 publications to research regarding the sustainable use of water in agriculture. Table 3 presents the top 10 most active authors. The active authors’ analysis is also shown in Figure 4a,b. This comprises the top 13 most productive authors over time and their H-index. The author H-index is an author-level indicator that seeks to gauge a scientist’s or scholar’s output as well as the impact of citations on their publications. The index comprises a set of the scientists’ most frequently referenced publications and how frequently those works have been cited in other papers. We find that Yingjie Li tops the list in the Figure 4c. With regards to the total number of publications, Yingjie Li was the most productive author, authoring 68 articles (12% of all articles), followed by Xiaoyan Wang (10.93% of all articles), and Yong Wang (10.81% of all articles). In terms of author local impact by total citations (TC), Muhammad Farooq is the foremost cited author (2495 TC), followed by Shahzad Maqsood Ahmed Basra (2155 TC), Wahid, A. (2155 TC), and Fujita, D. (2061 TC). Note from Figure 4a–c Yingjie Li stayed the most active author, whose contributions have perhaps laid the foundation for the major research project being undertaken today. But Figure 4f shows that Velasco-Munoz, J.F. has an M-index of 1.4 more than Yingjie Li, suggesting that this author can be considered as the most promising scientist in the field. Further, we use Lotka’s law, which states that contributions of authors making a single contribution are ~60% of the total publication in a given field; thus, it rewards authors with more publications, and can be validated for authors with 10 or more articles [46,47]. Based on this law, we find that only 17 authors have 10 or more publications (see, Figure 4c for the frequency distribution of scientific productivity). Furthermore, Figure 4b depicts the Top-output author from 1990 to 2022. Based on author production over time, Yushan Li, Xuan Wang, and Yue Wang are the top three authors constituting a longer temporal sequence of contributions time and published extensively between 2016 and 2022, as shown in Figure 4. We can deduce that most top-author publications were published within the past decade. On the other end, the result demonstrates that an increasing number of eminent scholars, such as Chen Fang and Jing-Zheng Huang, are dedicated to sustainable agricultural water use research. As a result, this field of study will perhaps continue to be a dominant topic.

3.4. Network Analysis for Co-Authorship and Countries

The network analysis of co-occurrence between authors on sustainable use of water in agricultural studies is given in Figure 5. Co-author analysis explores the social networks that scholars form when they collaborate on publications; thus, connections between authors are formed when they jointly publish a paper [41]. We examined 17 authors who were co-authored in more than four publications. We find that scholars’ collaborations are mostly limited to the country in which they originate. For instance, Li, Y., Liu, Y., Li, S., and Zhang, Z. are all Chinese and maintain closer ties with one another.

3.5. Distribution of Most Productive Affiliation and Countries

The affiliation disambiguation approach was applied to determine the most relevant institutional affiliation. This unravels leading institutions that have worked on the subject matter based on the co-authorship index per document (4.6). The result in Figure 5c suggests that there are 4060 institutions and the top 3 most prominent affiliated institutions producing publications allied to research on the sustainable use of water in agriculture are Northwest A&F University in Xianyang, China (373 articles), China Agricultural University (287 articles), and Hohai University in Nanjing, China (114 articles). Figure 6a presents the social structure and their connectedness, where Northwest A&F University and the Institute of Soil and Water Conservation (ISWC) place differently in global cooperation and collaborate closely.
Meanwhile, in terms of worldwide contributions, 94 countries have so far taken part in sustainable agricultural water use research. The top 3 leading countries are China (19,312 citations), the United States (17,178), and Australia (8549). Overall, these top three countries (China, USA, and Australia) account for 45,039 (43.4%) of the total 103,900 global citations. Figure 6b presents the collaboration network of countries. It is worth noting that in Figure 6b, the thickness of the lines indicates the depth of the association, with China and the United States (USA) placing nearly equal emphasis on global cooperation and collaborating most closely. Additionally, different scenarios emerge in Table 4. The total number of citations differs significantly from the average number of citations per article. As displayed in the list of top 13 countries (Table 4), articles from the China received the highest number of total article citations (TAC); thus, articles from the China represent the best in terms of average quality. However, Kenya (101 AAC), Russia (84 AAC), Israel (80 AAC), and Netherlands (52.7) with a relatively lower number of articles, have the highest average article citation (AAC). In terms of the number of publications (productivity analysis), it can be deduced that, while China (952) and the United States (697) remain in the top three, India (256) surpassed Australia (255) to take third position. From the result of the corresponding author’s countries, it can be inferred that not all countries have single-country publications (SCP), i.e., intra-country collaboration, for example, Morocco, Croatia, and Estonia, or multiple-country publications (MCP), i.e., inter-author country collaboration, for instance, Cuba, Uganda, and Peru. However, due to estimation niceties, we only presented the top 13 intra and inter-country collaborations (see Figure 4d). In addition, the most cited nations are shown in Figure 4d, based on the number of corresponding author countries.

3.6. Analysis of Documents

Identifying which publication has contributed to the agricultural water use literature is critical to understanding how this research stream has progressed. Similarly, assessing the citation trends in the agricultural water use sustainability literature may provide critical insights into where the research is headed. The study found 4106 documents with 104,030 citations at an average of 25.3 citations per document and an annual average citation rate of 3.3 percent. The top 25 most cited documents account for 12.5 percent of all citations, with most being published between 2006 and 2017. Table 5 and Figure 7 shows the top 25 most cited documents, with Farooq et al. (2009) [48] being the most influential. The leading five most prominent publications are rounded out by van Ittersum et al. (2013) [49], Gouveia & Oliveira (2009) [50], and Cattivelli et al. (2008) [51]. Most of the papers, for example, Farooq et al. (2009) [48] make theoretical contributions, focusing on the impacts of drought stress on the phenology, respiration, growth, water, and nutrient relations in plants. They also outlined numerous irrigation management systems and drought resistance mechanisms in plants, laying the theoretical underpinning for most of the subsequent literature on agricultural water sustainability. We examine the citation trends in our dataset to uncover the underlying historical roots and ensuing movers of sustainable water use in agriculture literature. This also illustrates the direction in which the literature is evolving and highlights upcoming papers. We assess citation trends by estimating the total local citation (TLC) score over the study’s end period (TLC). This value honors publications that have garnered higher citations in the three years leading up to the start of 2022. As a result, this approach can be used to determine which papers have been cited during a specific time and whether those papers have been cited more frequently recently, enabling the spotting of new trends [51,52]. Akin to the rating of the most influential documents, the three most trending papers are Blum (2009) [53], Liu et al. (2009) [54], and (Medrano et al., 2015) [55]. This reveals that water use efficiency is still prevalent in the literature on sustainable water use in agriculture. Table 5 and Table 6 also presents the 25 trending papers based on most globally and locally cited documents. Note that considerable disparities between local and global citations can also be observed. This demonstrates that studies on sustainable water use in agriculture are still nascent. Meanwhile, in terms of Most Local Cited References in Figure 7c, ALLEN R. G., 1998, FAO IRRIGATION AND DRAINAGE PAPER (456 Citations), HOEKSTRA A Y 2011 WATER FOOTPRINT ASSESSMENT MANUAL (165 Citations), and MEKONNEN MM, 2011, HYDROL EARTH SYST SC, V15, P1577, DOI 10.5194/HESS-15-1577-2011 (138 Citations), held the top positions. Generally, local citations count the number of times an author (or a piece of a document) in the collection has been referenced by other authors who are also authors in the collections. While regarding Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) Figure 7d, we find that the entire 4106 documents contain 164,021 references which have enjoyed 240,186 citations, with the number of citations peaking in 2014 (12,250 citations). For historical analyses based on bibliometric data, we can use RPYS to pinpoint the peak, which includes the works that have received highest citations, notably ALLEN R. G., 1998, MEKONNEN MM, 2011, and HOEKSTRA A.Y., 2011. This shows that studies on the sustainable use of water in agriculture are more conscientious in their citation behaviors and frequently cite earlier, more reputable studies.

3.7. Analysis and Co-Occurrence Network of Keywords

To better grasp the most relevant terms in our dataset, we analyze 6842 keywords, plus a metric offered by the Biblioshiny package built on words or phrases that routinely feature in the titles of articles references but not in the article’s title, as well as 9838 authors’ keywords. Regarding bibliometric mapping, keywords plus is superior to author keywords but less inductive for content analysis. Figure 8a presents the top 13 most relevant keywords, with irrigation (326 occurrences), water use efficiency (305 occurrences), and sustainability (288 occurrences) ranking as the first, second, and third most occurring keywords, respectively. These words partly mirror our search queries on WOS “irrigation,” “water use” “climate change,” and “sustainable,” suggesting that these are among the most commonly discussed areas in research on sustainable water use in agriculture. Other keywords such as water use efficiency, water, yield, climate change, water footprints, and evapotranspiration presents other main applications of sustainability.
Figure 8b presents the Author’s Keywords cloud on sustainable water use in agriculture literature from 1990 to 2022. This visual depiction shows terms with higher frequency and keyword density in a larger conspicuous typeface used by authors to index scientific papers and how frequently they co-occur with other sources, authors, and articles. Hence, the Keywords cloud can provide more visually appealing information. While one TreeMap (see Figure 8c) was generated for the analysis of 20 main Keywords Plus terms. Keywords Plus features words and phrases culled from the titles of cited articles and are used to decipher key terms and compare their various provenance. Keywords Plus are distinctive to WOS and vital parameters for extracting contents and scientific concepts expressed in articles [55]. The silhouette of the KeyWord Plus, accrued growth curve over time, highlights water management, followed by yield and water-use efficiency (see Figure 8c).

4. Discussion

4.1. General Trends in the Literature on Sustainable Agricultural Water Use

Having perfectly laid out the summary statistics, we now succinctly discuss the results. However, to establish the following discussions, let us briefly issue a basic caveat to readers. First, note that we did not engage in rigorous sample data collection as with every bibliometric analysis. Nonetheless, we relied on fairly simple and relatively easily assessable primary data collection and the use of appropriate analytical techniques to assess what research has been done on the sustainable use of water in agriculture to generate a tenable research trajectory for the field. In the discussion that follows, we review a few selected sample results, which lay out some insights that scholars, institutions, and policymakers can harvest. Perhaps more importantly, the findings are not intended to be a complete rundown of the field, primarily as no formal criteria were used to select results. So, readers interested in the complete details of the dataset and methods explored, as well as the findings of each specific application, are encouraged to consult other comparable scholarly articles. Thus, our findings should be used to supplement, as against supplanting a comprehensive study.
This paper examined extant literature indexed in the WOS database on the sustainable use of water in agriculture. Using bibliometric metrics and data visualization tools, we explore Biblioshiny for Bibliometrix analysis to define the present research landscape on sustainable water use in agriculture—examining contributions of journals, authors, keywords, Keyword Plus, highly cited papers, institutions, and countries. The results show growing interest in sustainable water use in agriculture research regarding relevance, citations, and publications. The growing number of articles and citations in the field of sustainability studies is evidence of this. The findings also indicate that developed countries are home to the top journals, countries, and institutions in this sector. In a similar vein, advanced economies were shown to collaborate most frequently in research. This could be seen from the perspective of their cutting-edge global research. The approach emphasizes that those in high-income economies concentrate on the research and development (R&D) processes. In contrast, we find that the perspective of Latin America, Southeast Asia, and African authors are underrepresented in the set of literature. On the basis of this viewpoint, perhaps it may be expected that future research in the field of sustainable water use in agriculture may emerge from developing nations.
We also find that research output in this field has increased exponentially in the last decade, with a sharp growth of 94.78 percent. Over the same period, citations soared by 63.59 percent, with a noticeable increase between 2016 and 2022, where 86.37 percent (298) of the papers were published. The timeline spanning 2016 to 2022, on the other hand, featured the most persistent high pattern of productivity and citation frequency, as also made evident by the M-growth index across time. Moreover, regarding the highest number of citations, publications, and the highest-ranking for country-based co-occurrence analysis, we found that China is presently the world-leading in research on sustainable water use in agriculture. Similarly, China is also the home of Northwest A&F University, the institution with the foremost publications. These findings indicate that China could substantially influence the field’s research direction. The United States came in second in terms of total publications, citations, and international collaboration.
In terms of journals influence, Agricultural Water Management (12% of total citations), Field Crops Research (5.5% of total citations) and Journal of Cleaner Production (2.4% of total citations) were the top three sources in terms of citations (19.9 percent of total citations). Regarding authors, the ones with the most papers were Yingjie Li (12% all articles), followed by Xiaoyan Wang (10.93% of all articles) and Yong Wang (10.81% of all articles). Figure 9 displays trends in research on the sustainable use of water in agriculture from 1990 to 2022, spanning authors, institutions, journals, and countries. We find that most papers were collaborative with multiple authors. Publications with more than one author made up most of the documents—indeed, the largest proportion of publications. This is already a trend in academia regarding articles by several authors. Dual authorships are becoming common, and there are clear reasons why. For instance, the growing proclivity to collaborate with other researchers worldwide promotes greater specialization, expertise, funding, and split of labor [103]. In addition, Figure 9 depicts how the ties between countries, authors, journals, and institutions might provide valuable insights. Research on sustainable use of water in agriculture, for example, is generally published in agricultural water management, and scholars from the Northwest A&F University in Xianyang, China author most of the scholarly publications. In addition, Figure 9 shows the interactions among the most active institutions, journals, and authors. Again, China and the United States have the most active authors with high-quality papers. Additionally, Figure 9 portrays the interactions between the participating countries, institutions, and authors. Overall, China and the United States have grabbed the top spot with high citations and high-quality publications in this field of research.

4.1.1. Conceptual Structure of Factorial Analysis of Keywords and Thematic Evolution

The Biblioshiny interface for Bibliometrics analysis supports multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) to craft the conceptual structure of the subject area and K-means clustering to uncover clusters of publications conveying commonalities using the conceptual Structure-function [104]. MCA does this by representing data as points in a low-dimensional Euclidean space. It is a variant of correspondence analysis (CA) and an exploratory multivariate method that allows examining the pattern of the relationship between numerous categorical variables using graphical and numerical analysis to find new latent variables, or factors. Thus, we explore this for our co-word analysis. Figure 10a depicts the co-word network maps using authors Keyword Plus. Results are interpreted on their comparative positions (nearness of words) of points and their dispersion along the dimensions—closer words are more similar in distribution. K-means clustering seeks to classify data into constructive or appropriate clusters (categories). We found that the Factorial analysis of keywords Plus yielded new insights, which is categorized by MCA into four categories. We discovered that the group containing the words such as “drought”, “stress”, “photosynthesis”, and “response” is consistent with crop response to water management. Figure 10b highlights the research’s theme evolution across time, as well as projected research directions. Over the past 32 years, there has been a noticeable shift in the research streams on sustainable use of water in agriculture. The rectangular and square shapes in Figure 10b running from left to right, depict the chronological progression of various thematic evolutions. The remaining time (2021–2022) is shown on the right, and the left side displays the theme development from 1990–2013. The connections between the keywords are indicated by the grey link/lines connected to the various rectangle-colored shapes; for instance, the keyword sustainability is used with phrases such as “water use,” “ecosystem,” “climate change,” and “water footprint” and is consistent (from 1990 to 2022). In the 32 years (1990–2022) covered, the term “sustainability” was used the most frequently, followed by “irrigation” and “water use efficiency.” Sustainability has proven to be crucial.

4.1.2. Outlook of Future Research on Sustainable Use of Water in Agriculture

Figure 11 presents co-occurrence network mappings to showcase the trendy contemporary topics and future directions in sustainable agricultural water use research, sorted by topic area or date of publications. The keywords suggests that a range of crop water productivity models (for example AquaCrop used to derive deficit irrigation schedules), soil amendments (Biochar), and farm management systems (agroforestry, agricultural management, water use efficiency, diets, and no-tillage) are associated with the sustainable use of water in agriculture. Due to niceties, our discussion of trendy streams is limited to the first three. The following are the most recent keywords in this domain that signal future trends. They are classified based on five (5) Word Minimum Frequency and Number of Words per Year (>5 words).
(a)
The “AquaCrop model” has become the most widely discussed topic in contemporary agricultural research on sustainable water use. In a world of increasing water scarcity (particularly in arid and semi-arid regions), deteriorating water quality, and climate change uncertainties and fluctuation, enhancing crop water use efficiency and productivity while reducing adverse environmental impacts is critical to meeting the growing food demand of the world’s increasing population [105,106]. This has birthed a wide variety of crop simulation models to tackle unsustainable water use, food security, and to explore how management and environmental factors influence crop production [106]. Yet some of these models usually require a high number of input variables and parameters, which are not easily obtainable for a vast number of crops and habitats around the globe. Moreover, using these models by non-research end-users, for example, farmers, policymakers, and extension specialists, presents other serious challenges, as models typically require large and difficult-to-find datasets for calibration [105]. To address these concerns, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) devised AquaCrop, a crop-water productivity model that aims for a balance of simplicity, precision, user friendliness, and robustness, requiring a minimal number of explicit parameter values and relatively intuitive input variables, all of which can be obtained using simple techniques [107]. Over the last 13 years, AquaCrop has been modified while maintaining its original purpose, i.e., to be a dynamic easily accessible tool to various user types, especially practitioner-type end users, in diverse fields and for a wide range of applications. Research scientists are now using AquaCrop for conceptualization and analysis as well. According to FAO, the new research offers important details on the tools’ applicability and recommendations for enhancing and improving the model and broadening its uses to boost water resource management and productivity [108]. Although the FAO formally introduced the AquaCrop model in 2009 [109], our metrics for word minimum frequency and word count per year reveal that it began to be widely used in 2017 and has followed this trajectory, thus making it a preferred crop model capable of formulating guidelines to increase crop-water productivity for rainfed and irrigated agriculture [110], and it has enjoyed vast simulation for different crops under various farm water use systems in recent times [111,112,113,114,115,116].
(b)
“Agroforestry” emerged second in the latest sets of keywords used by scholars in research on sustainable agricultural use of water. Since less than 1% of the water absorbed by the roots is used for photosynthesis and the majority of the water that enters the plant is lost through transpiration, controlling plant water losses by lowering evapotranspiration rates has been recommended as a potential method for sustainable use of water in agriculture [117]. Among these recommendations, agroforestry has been extensively cited for its crucial role in increasing farm production while preserving water resources. The topic of agroforestry is ancient [118,119,120], yet according to our metrics, interest in it has risen substantially in recent times, i.e., since 2018, specifically in relation to the sustainable use of water in agriculture.
Inspired by agroecological principles, agroforestry systems have been vigorously marketed for their positive effects on the environment, notably in terms of boosting soil fertility, enhancing microclimate, increasing carbon sequestration, boosting biodiversity, and enhancing water quality [121]. In this context, agroforestry offers a microclimate beneath trees that helps control transpiration and water conservation while reducing evaporation losses [122]. Perhaps the most significant attribute of agroforestry systems lies in the ability to stabilize and increase crop productivity in face of harsh climatic occurrences [123], thus helping in crop sustainable water management. In practice, there are three major categories of agroforestry systems: (a) silvopastoral systems, consisting of forestry and the grazing of domesticated animals on rangelands, pastures, or farms; (b) agrisilvicultural systems, which combine trees and crops; and (c) agrosilvopastoral systems, this includes crops, trees, and animals [121]. For the purpose of conserving soil and water, Kaushal et al. (2021) highlights that agroforestry techniques, including enhanced fallows, silvipastoral systems, home gardens, and alley cropping are most advantageous. Recent years have seen the development of innovative agroforestry technologies that not only offer sustainable production outputs but also effectively conserve water resources. However, the literature indicates that the adoption of these technologies has not been exactly encouraging [122]. Given what we know about increasing trends of climate change and variability, decreased precipitation, and increased competition for water resources, agricultural production may become more unpredictable; thus, agroforestry research will likely remain a hot topic in promoting the sustainable use of water in agriculture. As a result, it is urgently necessary to quantify the benefits of water conservation, particularly through agroforestry systems, in monetary terms and include them in policy programs.
(c)
“Biochar” is a pyrolyzed biomass-based soil amendment that boasts a carbon-rich matrix with high porosity, thereby increasing water retention capacity. According to research, biochar can be utilized to promote sustainable water conservation, thus stimulating crop growth [124,125]. Long-term droughts are common in arid and semi-arid regions and are likely to be exacerbated by climate change. As a result, increased water retention capacity of crops is being pushed, since it may lower water costs in agriculture throughout these water-stressed regions and ease pressure on water resources. Abstractly, it has been suggested to sustainably enhance soil functions (under present and future management) while reducing potential trade-offs, and it is now being factored into the equation for international policy development, for instance, in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Land [126,127]. Besides this benefit, the authors highlight that biochar properties could be “custom fit,” to better address distinct soil natural constraints without impairing other soil functions. For example, Batool et al. (2015) [128] found evidence that water use efficiency significantly increased in plants containing Biochar as compared to untreated plants after studying potential of soil amendments in boosting the water use efficiency of Abelmoschus esculentus.

5. Conclusions

Worldwide research on sustainable water uses in agriculture have developed rapidly over recent decades, and a range of structural factors that can promote water sustainability has been described in the literature using different models and methodologies. Some are targeted at the household level, while others are geared toward communal, regional, national, and global scales. From a set of 4106 documents, we use Biblioshiny for Bibliometrix analysis to evaluate how scholarly research on sustainable water use in agriculture has evolved, which perspectives are most influential, and highlighted research agendas that are meaningfully pushing the literature set forward. Bibliometric analysis assists in examining publication trends and patterns to capture the essence and level of productivity of a discipline and to assist researchers in choosing what to publish and where to publish while taking into account the productivity of the subject, most relevant journals, countries, authors, thematic evolution, institutions, etc. The proportion of publications and citations has continuously increased during the past few decades. Furthermore, no discipline controls the active research field of sustainable water use in agriculture. Results indicate that the literature on sustainable water use in agriculture has been shaped by diverse country- and institutional-level actors.
We also found that the top three most prominent Affiliated institutions producing publications allied to research on the sustainable use of water in agriculture are Northwest A&F University in Xianyang, China (373 articles), China Agricultural University (287 articles), and Hohai University in Nanjing, China (114 articles), thus representing the most influential journals shaping the research field. The top three countries are China, USA, and Australia, accounting for 45,039 (43.4%) of the total 103,900 global citations. This indicates that collaborations are mostly limited to the country in which they originate, and these affiliations may act as a catalyst for expanding worldwide studies on sustainable use of water in agriculture. Using data visualization and content analysis articles sorted through bibliometric citation analysis, five current research streams were identified in the literature advocating for the use of the aquacrop model, agroforestry, biochar, no-tillage, and diet, to promote the sustainable use of water in agriculture. However, there are still several gaps to fill. Perhaps the most pressing of these is a call for more comparative studies from the aforementioned under-represented countries. Given the abundance of studies on sustainable water use in agriculture and the unlikelihood for a single database to present a complete picture of a research field with global impact such as this, other research areas deserving further exploration could be to leverage other databases and/or combining the two primary bibliographic databases such as Clarivate Analytics Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. Finally, the Biblioshiny for Bibliometrix analysis of the papers published on sustainable water use in agriculture is of high importance for researchers in identifying the most active authors, countries, journals, and institutions, examining research hot spots, and forecasting the research trends on sustainable water use in agriculture.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, E.A.A.; methodology, E.A.A.; software, E.A.A.; validation, E.A.A.; formal analysis, E.A.A.; investigation, E.A.A.; resources, E.A.A.; data curation, E.A.A.; writing—original draft preparation, E.A.A.; writing—review and editing, E.A.A., Y.T.B. and H.J.; visualization, E.A.A.; supervision, Y.T.B. and H.J.; project administration, E.A.A.; funding acquisition, H.J. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Funding

This research is based on a project, “Assessing the Social and Economic Impact of Changed Water Use Behaviour in Food Production in South Africa (C2022/2023-00798)”, managed and funded by the Water Research Commission (WRC). Financial and other support from the WRC is gratefully acknowledged.

Institutional Review Board Statement

Not applicable.

Informed Consent Statement

Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement

Data available upon reasonable request.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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Figure 1. (a) Distribution of annual scientific publications. (b) Average article citation per year.
Figure 1. (a) Distribution of annual scientific publications. (b) Average article citation per year.
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Figure 2. Nuclear zone 1 showing the source growth of the 13 most productive journals on sustainable water use research in agriculture from 1990–2022.
Figure 2. Nuclear zone 1 showing the source growth of the 13 most productive journals on sustainable water use research in agriculture from 1990–2022.
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Figure 3. Source Analysis (a) Source local impact by H-index; (b) Most relevant sources; (c) Source local impact by G—index; (d) Source local impact by total citations (TC) index; (e) Most local cited sources.
Figure 3. Source Analysis (a) Source local impact by H-index; (b) Most relevant sources; (c) Source local impact by G—index; (d) Source local impact by total citations (TC) index; (e) Most local cited sources.
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Figure 4. Analysis of the active author: (a) The top 13 most relevant authors; (b) Top author’s production from 1990—2022; (c) Author local impact by H-index (d) Author local impact by Total Citations; (e) Frequency Distribution of Scientific Productivity (f) Most locally Cited Authors and (g) M-index of publications from different authors.
Figure 4. Analysis of the active author: (a) The top 13 most relevant authors; (b) Top author’s production from 1990—2022; (c) Author local impact by H-index (d) Author local impact by Total Citations; (e) Frequency Distribution of Scientific Productivity (f) Most locally Cited Authors and (g) M-index of publications from different authors.
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Figure 5. Network analysis for co-authorship and countries (a) Network visualization map of co-occurrence between authors. Authors with larger circles or font sizes had a higher number of publications; (b) Global trends of the most cited countries on publications of sustainable use of water in agriculture 1990–2022; (c) Most relevant affiliations; and (d) Countries of leading corresponding authors.
Figure 5. Network analysis for co-authorship and countries (a) Network visualization map of co-occurrence between authors. Authors with larger circles or font sizes had a higher number of publications; (b) Global trends of the most cited countries on publications of sustainable use of water in agriculture 1990–2022; (c) Most relevant affiliations; and (d) Countries of leading corresponding authors.
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Figure 6. Collaboration Network analysis of countries and institutions (a) the network map of institutions, and (b) the network map of countries. The thickness of the lines depicts the strength of the association.
Figure 6. Collaboration Network analysis of countries and institutions (a) the network map of institutions, and (b) the network map of countries. The thickness of the lines depicts the strength of the association.
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Figure 7. Documents citation (a) Top 13 Most Global Cited Documents [48,49,50,51,53,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63]; (b) Top 13 Most Local Cited Documents [49,51,53,54,55,60,64,65,66,67,68,69,70]; (c) Top 13 Most Local Cited References [34,57,71,72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80,81] and (d) Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS).
Figure 7. Documents citation (a) Top 13 Most Global Cited Documents [48,49,50,51,53,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63]; (b) Top 13 Most Local Cited Documents [49,51,53,54,55,60,64,65,66,67,68,69,70]; (c) Top 13 Most Local Cited References [34,57,71,72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80,81] and (d) Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS).
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Figure 8. Analysis and Co-occurrence Network of Keywords: (a) Top 13 most relevant keywords; (b) Author’s Keywords cloud; (c) One TreeMap of Keywords Plus terms.
Figure 8. Analysis and Co-occurrence Network of Keywords: (a) Top 13 most relevant keywords; (b) Author’s Keywords cloud; (c) One TreeMap of Keywords Plus terms.
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Figure 9. Three-Field Plots among countries (AU_CO) (a), institutions (AU_UN) (b), authors (AU) (c), and journals (SO) on research on sustainable water use in agriculture.
Figure 9. Three-Field Plots among countries (AU_CO) (a), institutions (AU_UN) (b), authors (AU) (c), and journals (SO) on research on sustainable water use in agriculture.
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Figure 10. Conceptual Structure: (a) Factorial Analysis of Author’s Keywords Plus using Multiple Correspondence Analysis and (b) Thematic Evolution of Author’s Keywords using the leading eigenvalues.
Figure 10. Conceptual Structure: (a) Factorial Analysis of Author’s Keywords Plus using Multiple Correspondence Analysis and (b) Thematic Evolution of Author’s Keywords using the leading eigenvalues.
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Figure 11. Co-occurrence network mapping showcasing trendy topics from 2004–2022. Classified based on five (5) Word Minimum Frequency and Number of Words per Year (>5 words), with a longer wick signifying the year of word first and last occurrence.
Figure 11. Co-occurrence network mapping showcasing trendy topics from 2004–2022. Classified based on five (5) Word Minimum Frequency and Number of Words per Year (>5 words), with a longer wick signifying the year of word first and last occurrence.
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Table
Table 1. Summary statistics of the articles collected.
Table 1. Summary statistics of the articles collected.
DescriptionResults
Timespan 1990:2022
Sources (e.g., journals, book etc.)722
Documents4106
Average years from publication6
Average citations per documents25.3
Average citations per year per doc3.3
References164,021
Keywords Plus6842
Author’s Keywords9838
Authors 12,686
Author Appearances19,091
Authors of multi-authored documents214
Single-authored documents12,472
Documents per Author0.3
Authors per Document 3
Collaboration Index3.2
Table
Table 2. First cluster (nuclear zone).
Table 2. First cluster (nuclear zone).
Elementh_indexg_indexm_indexTCNPPY_start
AGRICULTURAL WATER MANAGEMENT57951.96612,1913241994
FIELD CROPS RESEARCH38751.525755921998
JOURNAL OF CLEANER PRODUCTION29422.07124841092009
SCIENCE OF THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT28482.1542674962010
WATER RESOURCES MANAGEMENT27441.1742190692000
SOIL\& TILLAGE RESEARCH25451.1362073452001
JOURNAL OF HYDROLOGY24400.751727541991
AGRICULTURAL SYSTEMS21340.9131298482000
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF AGRONOMY20390.7141560411995
AGRICULTURE ECOSYSTEMS\& ENVIRONMENT19360.9051713362002
Total citations (TC), Number of publications (NP), Publication Year (PY).
Table
Table 3. Top 10 most active authors on sustainable agriculture water use research.
Table 3. Top 10 most active authors on sustainable agriculture water use research.
AuthorsArticlesArticles Fractionalized
LI, Y.6812.33
WANG, X.5610.93
WANG, Y.5610.81
ZHANG, Y.569.26
ZHANG, X.468.69
WANG, S.428.08
LIU, J.417.97
ZHANG, J.386.99
LI, J.376.82
WANG, J.345.53
Table
Table 4. Contributions of the top 13 countries to the total citations on sustainable water use research in agriculture.
Table 4. Contributions of the top 13 countries to the total citations on sustainable water use research in agriculture.
CountryTotal CitationsAverage Article CitationsNumber of Articles
China19,31220.286952
USA17,17824.646697
Australia854933.525255
Italy632729.986211
United Kingdom597250.61118
Germany490933.855145
Spain484025.078193
The Netherlands479952.73691
India392715.34256
Pakistan300445.51566
Portugal273052.552
Canada164627.43360
Israel15208019
Table
Table 5. Top 25 Most Global Cited Documents.
Table 5. Top 25 Most Global Cited Documents.
PaperDOITotal CitationsTC per YearNormalized TC
FAROOQ M, 2009, AGRON SUSTAIN DEV [48]10.1051/agro:20080212061147.214321.8748
VAN ITTERSUM MK, 2013, FIELD CROP RES [49]10.1016/j.fcr.2012.09.00982782.719.9664
GOUVEIA L, 2009, J IND MICROBIOL BIOTECHNOL [50]10.1007/s10295-008-0495-682358.78578.7351
CATTIVELLI L, 2008, FIELD CROP RES [51]10.1016/j.fcr.2007.07.0047505010.3364
BLUM A, 2009, FIELD CROP RES [53]10.1016/j.fcr.2009.03.00968548.92867.2704
ANJUM SA, 2011, AFR J AGRIC RES [56]NA67456.166712.8071
GEERTS S, 2009, AGRIC WATER MANAGE [57]10.1016/j.agwat.2009.04.00954739.07145.8057
PEREIRA LS, 2002, AGRIC WATER MANAGE [58]10.1016/S0378-3774(02)00075-652725.09526.6389
STEINMETZ Z, 2016, SCI TOTAL ENVIRON [59]10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.01.15351273.142918.6953
STOLL M, 2000, J EXP BOT [60]10.1093/jexbot/51.350.162743418.86964.8686
SHAO HB, 2008, C R BIOL [61]10.1016/j.crvi.2008.01.00243028.66675.9262
HAVLIK P, 2011, ENERGY POLICY [62]10.1016/j.enpol.2010.03.03042435.33338.0567
GOMIERO T, 2011, CRIT REV PLANT SCI [63]10.1080/07352689.2011.55435540133.41677.6197
WADA Y, 2014, EARTH SYST DYNAM [64]10.5194/esd-5-15-201438242.444411.5523
POSTEL SL, 2000, ECOL APPL [82]10.2307/264100938116.56524.274
WARD FA, 2008, PROC NATL ACAD SCI U S A [83]10.1073/pnas.080555410537825.25.2096
SHIFERAW B, 2013, FOOD SECUR [84]10.1007/s12571-013-0263-y370378.933
BOUMAN BAM, 2005, AGRIC WATER MANAGE [85]10.1016/j.agwat.2004.11.00735619.77787.4624
KARP A, 2008, NEW PHYTOL [86]10.1111/j.1469-8137.2008.02432.x34923.26674.8099
SMITH P, 2007, AGRIC ECOSYST ENVIRON [87]10.1016/j.agee.2006.06.00634521.56256.0047
CREUTZIG F, 2015, GCB BIOENERGY [88]10.1111/gcbb.1220534242.759.298
MORISON JIL, 2008, PHILOS TRANS R SOC B-BIOL SCI [89]10.1098/rstb.2007.217534122.73334.6996
REYNOLDS M, 2012, PLANT CELL ENVIRON [90]10.1111/j.1365-3040.2012.02588.x32129.18187.9163
BLUM A, 2017, PLANT CELL ENVIRON [91]10.1111/pce.1280030751.166711.6015
Table
Table 6. Top 25 Most Local Cited Documents.
Table 6. Top 25 Most Local Cited Documents.
DocumentDOIYearLCGCLC/GC Ratio (%)NLCNGC
BLUM A, 2009, FIELD CROP RES [53]10.1016/j.fcr.2009.03.0092009556858.0327.107.27
MEDRANO H, 2015, CROP J [55]10.1016/j.cj.2015.04.00220152923612.2922.726.42
LIU CA, 2009, EUR J AGRON [54]10.1016/j.eja.2009.08.00420092725010.8013.302.65
WADA Y, 2014, ENVIRON RES LETT [65]10.1088/1748-9326/9/10/10400320142620812.5019.036.29
VAN ITTERSUM MK, 2013, FIELD CROP RES [49]10.1016/j.fcr.2012.09.0092013258273.0219.1619.97
MEDRANO H, 2015, AGRON SUSTAIN DEV [66]10.1007/s13593-014-0280-z20152312418.5518.023.37
STOLL M, 2000, J EXP BOT [60]10.1093/jexbot/51.350.16272000224345.0710.274.87
WADA Y, 2014, EARTH SYST DYNAM [64]10.5194/esd-5-15-20142014223825.7616.1111.55
VANHAM D, 2013, ECOL INDIC [67]10.1016/j.ecolind.2012.10.02120132113915.1116.103.36
CATTIVELLI L, 2008, FIELD CROP RES [51]10.1016/j.fcr.2007.07.0042008207502.6710.7110.34
PAGE G, 2012, J CLEAN PROD [68]10.1016/j.jclepro.2012.03.03620122012516.0014.193.08
LAMASTRA L, 2014, SCI TOTAL ENVIRON [69]10.1016/j.scitotenv.2014.05.0632014199120.8813.912.75
HUANG GB, 2008, FIELD CROP RES [70]10.1016/j.fcr.2007.12.0112008177323.299.101.01
ENE SA, 2013, J CLEAN PROD [92]10.1016/j.jclepro.2012.11.0512013179318.2813.032.25
JAT ML, 2013, FIELD CROP RES [93]10.1016/j.fcr.2013.04.0242013179717.5313.032.34
HOEKSTRA AY, 2017, WATER RESOUR MANAG [94]10.1007/s11269-017-1618-520171712313.8220.584.65
CHEN JY, 2003, ENVIRON GEOL [95]10.1007/s00254-003-0792-32003166823.5316.001.24
KARP A, 2008, NEW PHYTOL [86]10.1111/j.1469-8137.2008.02432.x2008163494.588.574.81
TOMAS M, 2014, ENVIRON EXP BOT [96]10.1016/j.envexpbot.2013.09.0032014168020.0011.712.42
LIU CA, 2014, EUR J AGRON [97]10.1016/j.eja.2013.10.0012014168718.3911.712.63
PARIHAR CM, 2016, FIELD CROP RES [98]10.1016/j.fcr.2016.03.0132016166723.8821.862.45
ZHANG JH, 1998, FIELD CROP RES [99]10.1016/S0378-4290(98)00104-X1998151629.2610.004.45
RIDOUTT BG, 2009, J CLEAN PROD [100]10.1016/j.jclepro.2009.03.0022009158218.297.390.87
GATHALA MK, 2011, AGRON J [101]10.2134/agronj2010.039420111511413.1615.492.17
SINGH A, 2014, J HYDROL [102]10.1016/j.jhydrol.2014.09.0492014159216.3010.982.78
Local citations (LC), Global Citations (GC), Normalized Global Citations (NGC), Normalized Local Citations (NLC).
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Abafe, E.A.; Bahta, Y.T.; Jordaan, H. Exploring Biblioshiny for Historical Assessment of Global Research on Sustainable Use of Water in Agriculture. Sustainability 2022, 14, 10651. https://doi.org/10.3390/su141710651

AMA Style

Abafe EA, Bahta YT, Jordaan H. Exploring Biblioshiny for Historical Assessment of Global Research on Sustainable Use of Water in Agriculture. Sustainability. 2022; 14(17):10651. https://doi.org/10.3390/su141710651

Chicago/Turabian Style

Abafe, Ejovi Akpojevwe, Yonas T. Bahta, and Henry Jordaan. 2022. "Exploring Biblioshiny for Historical Assessment of Global Research on Sustainable Use of Water in Agriculture" Sustainability 14, no. 17: 10651. https://doi.org/10.3390/su141710651

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