A Scientometric Review of Grain Storage Technology in the Past 15 Years (2007–2022) Based on Knowledge Graph and Visualization

Abstract

Food storage helps to ensure the food consumption needs of non-agricultural populations and to respond to major natural disasters or other emergencies, and the application of food storage technology can reduce post-harvest food losses. However, there are still obvious shortcomings in coping with large grain losses. Therefore, quantitative analysis of the research hotspots and evolutionary trends of grain storage technology is important to help the development of grain storage technology. This article uses the Web of Science database from 2007 to 2022 as a data sample with the help of CiteSpace software to analyze the basic situation, research hotspots, and evolutionary trends to draw a series of relevant knowledge maps. Visual analysis revealed that the number of publications had grown rapidly since 2015. First, the Journal of Stored Products Research, Journal of Economic Entomology, and Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, with citation frequencies of 929, 536, and 453, should be focused on in order to keep up with the latest research developments in this field. The United States, China, and Brazil occupy dominant positions in relation to grain storage technology studies in general. Purdue University, Kansas State University, and Agricultural Research Institute ranked the top three in terms of the number and centrality of publications. In terms of research hotspots, the centrality of temperature, insects, carbon dioxide, and quality were 0.16, 0.09, 0.08, and 0.08. It shows that the field of grain storage technology in recent years has focused on grain storage temperature, pest control, and grain storage quality research. From the perspective of the evolution trend, the life cycle of emergent words lasts for several years, after which the strength of emergent words slowly decreases and is replaced by new emergent words. Mortality was the first keyword to appear and remained from 2007 to 2011, indicating that research on fumigants and their toxicity, as well as pest mortality under air fumigation and chemical fumigation conditions, became more popular during this period. In recent years, new terms have emerged that had never been used before, such as “grain quality” (2019–2022) and “stability” (2020–2022). We can find that people pursue food quality more with the improvement of people’s living standards. In this context, future research should seek more efficient, safe, economical, and environmentally friendly methods of grain storage and continuously improve the level of scientific grain storage.