Worldwide Research on the Ozone Influence in Plants

Abstract

Tropospheric ozone (O3) is a secondary air pollutant and a greenhouse gas, whose concentration has been increasing since the industrial era and is expected to increase further in the near future. O3 molecules can be inhaled by humans and animals, causing significant health problems; they can also diffuse through the leaf stomata of plants, triggering significant phytotoxic damage that entails a weakening of the plant, reducing its ability to cope with other abiotic and biotic stresses. This eventually leads to a reduction in the yield and quality of crops, which is a serious problem as it puts global food security at risk. Due to the importance of this issue, a bibliometric analysis on O3 in the plant research field is carried out through the Web of Science (WoS) database. Different aspects of the publications are analysed, such as the number of documents published per year, the corresponding scientific areas, distribution of documents by countries, institutions and languages, publication type and affiliations, and, finally, special attention is paid to O3 study in plants by means of studies about the word occurrence frequency in titles and abstracts, and the articles most frequently cited. The bibliometric study shows the great effort made by the scientific community in order to understand the damages caused by O3 in plants, which will help reduce the big losses that O3 causes in agriculture.