The Digital Agricultural Revolution: a Bibliometric Analysis Literature Review

TL;DR

This bibliometric review analyzes 4995 articles from 2012-2019 to identify key themes, influential sources, and emerging trends in digital agriculture, confirming the ongoing Digital Agricultural Revolution and its main research streams.

Contribution

It provides an objective, comprehensive bibliometric analysis of digital agriculture literature, identifying main research streams and recent trending topics.

Findings

Identified five main research streams: CSA, SSM, RS, IoT, AI.

Mapped influential journals, institutions, and countries.

Highlighted emerging topics in recent years.

Abstract

The application of digital technologies in agriculture can improve traditional practices to adapt to climate change, reduce Greenhouse Gases (GHG) emissions, and promote a sustainable intensification for food security. Some authors argued that we are experiencing a Digital Agricultural Revolution (DAR) that will boost sustainable farming. This study aims to find evidence of the ongoing DAR process and clarify its roots, what it means, and where it is heading. We investigated the scientific literature with bibliometric analysis tools to produce an objective and reproducible literature review. We retrieved 4995 articles by querying the Web of Science database in the timespan 2012-2019, and we analyzed the obtained dataset to answer three specific research questions: i) what is the spectrum of the DAR-related terminology?; ii) what are the key articles and the most influential journals, institutions, and countries?; iii) what are the main research streams and the emerging topics? By grouping the authors' keywords reported on publications, we identified five main research streams: Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA), Site-Specific Management (SSM), Remote Sensing (RS), Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI). To provide a broad overview of each of these topics, we analyzed relevant review articles, and we present here the main achievements and the ongoing challenges. Finally, we showed the trending topics of the last three years (2017, 2018, 2019).