A Scientometric Analysis of Research Trends and Knowledge Structure on the Climate Effects of Irrigation between 1993 and 2022

Abstract

Irrigation, as one of the most impactful human interventions in the terrestrial water cycle, has been arousing great attention due to research on the impacts of its interaction with climate. In this paper, we used a scientometric analysis method to explore the overall publication output of the climatic effects of irrigation (CEI) field from the Web of Science Core Collection (WSCC) database, covering the time period from 1993 to 2022. And, through a visual scientific citation analysis tool, CiteSpace, we studied the knowledge structure, disciplinary trajectory, frontier hotspots, and academic impacts in the field of CEI. Using topic screening, 2919 publications related to irrigation climate were searched. CEI research has gone through the knowledge germination stage (1993–2005), knowledge accretion stage (2006–2012), and the knowledge prosperity stage (2013–2022), respectively. Ecology, earth, and marine are the most influential disciplines of research in this field, and they are influenced by earth, geology, geophysics and plant, ecology, zoology. AWM and SOTTE are the most popular journals currently. The academic impacts of scientific stakeholders are uneven. European and American countries have profound influence in the research field. The keyword of “Climate change” is the turning point in the co-word analysis network, and research hotspots focus on “carbon dioxide”, “model”, “climate”, “growth”, “temperature”, “biomass”, “global warming”, “CO2”, “global change”, “dynamics”, “adjustments”, and “atmospheric CO2”. The knowledge base of the CEI field can be divided into 14 clusters, such as cotton production, semi-arid condition, and irrigation water supply, and these three clusters are the three largest among them. This paper offers a comprehensive scientometric review of CEI, and, to some degree, provides some reference for the relevant research on the climate effects of irrigation, which will be beneficial to understand the current research situation and development trend in this field, as well as provide state-of-the-art and future perspectives.