Agriculture Digitalization: A Global Examination Based on Bibliometric Analysis

Several research studies discuss the process of agriculture digitalization proposing technologies able to face the current agri-food challenges. However, the extant bibliometric studies do not fully exploit the complementarity of different modern bibliometric tools, such as performance analysis and science mapping and do not consider the entire research field timespan. Therefore, the aim of this study is to complement and update the previous works and provide a broad quantitative and qualitative view of Agriculture 4.0 research by using synergistically performance analysis and science mapping. The analysis was realized on a sample of 2334 papers adopting statistical frequency analysis and VOSviewer. Performance analysis provided key findings about the following indicators: research subject areas, publications trend, most productive journals, document types, authors productivity, authors' and index keywords, most cited papers, most productive and influent institutions, country map collaboration, the documents by funding sponsor. Science mapping provided key findings about the main thematic research field’ clusters and their evolution overtime: technology application in agricultural industry, data model for analysis and prediction, experimentation and applicative studies of smart agriculture, decision support systems for crop monitoring. This study could benefit: food companies, supporting in technologies identification; governments, suggesting policies to stimulate agricultural digitalization process; academics, incentivizing more consciousness about the topic and research agenda; those who approach this topic for the first time, facilitating bibliographical referencing.