Scientometric Analysis on Rice Research under Drought, Waterlogging or Abrupt Drought-Flood Alternation Stress

Abstract

Many studies have shown that abiotic stresses could severely impact crop growth and yield, but a comprehensive review from a bibliometric perspective is lacking. This study explores how the research direction of rice under drought, waterlogging or both stresses has evolved over the past three decades, based on bibliometric analysis using Vosviewer 1.6.15 and HistCite Pro. Data were collected from the academic database of Web of Science. The results showed that 12 journals had a high number of publications and highly local citations. Meanwhile, the three journals of Field Crops Research, Journal of Experimental Botany and Plant Physiology could be the most influential leaders in this field. The author Arvind Kumar had the highest contribution to the output of articles, and Lizhong Xiong had a greater impact on the field. China, and Chinese institutions, were dominant in terms of the number of articles, but Japan, Germany, UK and institutions in USA and Japan had a higher quality of publications on average. Scholars are concerned with using transgenic methods for improving rice productivity with increasing abiotic stress tolerance; the research topics of rice cultivars, irrigation, water-use efficiency and soil fertility may be gradually shifting from a single theme to intertwining with the themes of genomics and abiotic/biotic resistance with climate change in the future.