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Review
. 2021 Nov 26;21(23):7889.
doi: 10.3390/s21237889.

A Bibliometric Network Analysis of Recent Publications on Digital Agriculture to Depict Strategic Themes and Evolution Structure

Michele Kremer Sott  1 , Leandro da Silva Nascimento  2 , Cristian Rogério Foguesatto  1 , Leonardo B Furstenau  3 , Kadígia Faccin  1 , Paulo Antônio Zawislak  2 , Bruce Mellado  4 , Jude Dzevela Kong  5 , Nicola Luigi Bragazzi  5
Affiliations
Review

A Bibliometric Network Analysis of Recent Publications on Digital Agriculture to Depict Strategic Themes and Evolution Structure

Michele Kremer Sott et al. Sensors (Basel). .

Abstract

The agriculture sector is one of the backbones of many countries' economies. Its processes have been changing to enable technology adoption to increase productivity, quality, and sustainable development. In this research, we present a scientific mapping of the adoption of precision techniques and breakthrough technologies in agriculture, so-called Digital Agriculture. To do this, we used 4694 documents from the Web of Science database to perform a Bibliometric Performance and Network Analysis of the literature using SciMAT software with the support of the PICOC protocol. Our findings presented 22 strategic themes related to Digital Agriculture, such as Internet of Things (IoT), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and Climate-smart Agriculture (CSA), among others. The thematic network structure of the nine most important clusters (motor themes) was presented and an in-depth discussion was performed. The thematic evolution map provides a broad perspective of how the field has evolved over time from 1994 to 2020. In addition, our results discuss the main challenges and opportunities for research and practice in the field of study. Our findings provide a comprehensive overview of the main themes related to Digital Agriculture. These results show the main subjects analyzed on this topic and provide a basis for insights for future research.

Keywords: agriculture 4.0; bibliometrics; digital agriculture; industry 4.0; innovation; precision agriculture; science mapping; smart farming; sustainability.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
(a) Strategic diagram; (b) Thematic network structure; (c) Thematic evolution structure.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Publications over time (1994–21 September 2020).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Strategic diagram and performance analysis.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Thematic network structures. (a) UAV; (b) CSA; (c) IoT; (d) Spatial Variability; (e) GPS; (f) Image Processing; (g) Nitrogen; (h) Hyperspectral; (i) Yield Prediction.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Thematic evolution structure.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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