Bibliometric Analysis of Research on Soil Water from 1934 to 2019

Abstract

As an essential factor of the earth’s critical zone, soil water has a remarkable influence on nutrient cycle and energy flow in terrestrial ecosystems and has attracted the attention of considerable scholars. Based on the online database of Web of Science, the bibliometric analysis was performed to evaluate the evolution feature of soil water research from 1934 to 2019. The results showed a rapid growth of scientific outputs with a gradually increasing proportion of internationally collaborative articles. Environmental Sciences, Water Resources, and Soil Science were the most frequently used subject categories, and the Journal of Hydrology had the highest number of publications in this field. The institutions from the USA and China were the most active, and the USA occupied a leading position in soil water research, producing the most articles and having the most considerable number of citations. Clusters of authors were mostly located in North America, Western Europe, West Asia, and East Asia. Keywords analysis demonstrated that climate change, drought, evapotranspiration, remote sensing, and irrigation were the current research hotspots. Scientific issues focusing on the interaction between soil water and environmental factors, drought forecast, relationships between soil structure and water/solute transport, improving the accuracy and depth of soil moisture monitoring with satellite, and spatio-temporal scaling transform require further research.