A Bibliometric Analysis of Global Fine Roots Research in Forest Ecosystems during 1992–2020

Trends in Seed Priming Research in the Past 30 Years Based on Bibliometric Analysis

Seed priming (SP) treatments are widely used in agriculture and restoration to improve seed germination and seedling vigor. Although there exists a considerable amount of scientific literature on SP, it has seldom undergone visual and quantitative analyses. To gain insights into the patterns observed in SP research over the last three decades, we conducted a bibliometric analysis using the Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCI-E) database, aiming to minimize the similarity score in plagiarism detection. This analysis offers a thorough examination of yearly publications, temporal patterns in keyword usage, the top-performing journals, authors, institutions, and countries within the field of SP. Our research findings suggest a steady annual increase of 10.59% in the volume of SP publications, accompanied by a significant upward trajectory in the average citations received per paper annually. According to the analysis of keywords, it was found that "priming" and "germination" emerged as the most frequently used terms in the field of SP research. Seed Science and Technology ranked first among the top journals, and Plant Physiology had greater influence in the field of SP in terms of number of citations. The majority of the top 10 productive institutions were situated in developing countries. In addition, these nations exhibited the highest volume of published works and citations. Our analysis revealed a shift in research focus within the field of SP over the past three decades, transitioning from agricultural science to encompass plant science and environmental science. With the growing recognition of SP's research across different disciplines, there exist abundant prospects for international and interdisciplinary partnerships, collaborative organizations, and progress in this field.

Plant responses to high temperature and drought: A bibliometrics analysis

Global climate change is expected to further increase the frequency and severity of extreme events, such as high temperature/heat waves as well as drought in the future. Thus, how plant responds to high temperature and drought has become a key research topic. In this study, we extracted data from Web of Science Core Collections database, and synthesized plant responses to high temperature and drought based on bibliometric methods using software of R and VOSviewer. The results showed that a stabilized increasing trend of the publications (1199 papers) was found during the period of 2008 to 2014, and then showed a rapid increase (2583 papers) from year 2015 to 2021. Secondly, the top five dominant research fields of plant responses to high temperature and drought were Plant Science, Agroforestry Science, Environmental Science, Biochemistry, and Molecular Biology, respectively. The largest amount of published article has been found in the Frontiers in Plant Science journal, which has the highest global total citations and H-index. We also found that the journal of Plant Physiology has the highest local citations. From the most cited papers and references, the most important research focus was the improvement of crop yield and vegetation stress resistance. Furthermore, "drought" has been the most prominent keyword over the last 14 years, and more attention has been paid to "climate change" over the last 5 years. Under future climate change, how to regulate growth and development of food crops subjected to high temperature and drought stress may become a hotspot, and increasing research is critical to provide more insights into plant responses to high temperature and drought by linking plant above-below ground components. To summarize, this research will contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the past, present, and future research on plant responses to high temperature and drought.

Trends in Research on Forest Ecosystem Services in the Most Recent 20 Years: A Bibliometric Analysis

Forest resources and the flow of ecosystem services they provide play a key role in supporting national and regional economies, improving people’s lives, protecting biodiversity, and mitigating the impacts of climate change. Based on the ISI (Institute of Scientific Information) Web of Science (WoS) database, we used a bibliometric approach to analyze the research status, evolution process, and hotspots of forest ecosystem services (FES) from a compilation of 8797 documents published between 1997 and 2019. The results indicated that: (1) research on forest ecosystem services has developed rapidly over the past 23 years. Institutions in the United States and other developed countries have significantly contributed to undertake research on the topic of ecosystem services. (2) The 11 hotpot key focus areas of completed research were payments for ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation, forest governance, ecosystem approaches, climate change, nitrogen, ecosystem management, pollination, cities, ecological restoration, and policy. (3) The trade-off relationships among ecosystem services, ecosystem resilience and stability have become the research frontier in this field. (4) Future research on FES will likely focus on the formation and evolution mechanism of ecosystem services; the interaction, feedback and intrinsic connections of ecosystem services at different scales; analysis of the trade-offs and synergies; unified evaluation standards, evaluation systems, model construction and scenario analyses; in-depth studies of the internal correlation mechanism between forest ecosystem services and human wellbeing; and realization of cross-disciplinary and multi-method integration in sustainable forest management and decision-making.