Descriptive Mappings of Global‐Related Research Studies on Invertebrates in the Context of Agriculture

Abstract

Invertebrates form a vital component of agricultural ecosystems, and they are chief actors in sustaining the functions of the ecosystem and soil health. Scholarly publications that concentrated on visualizing the research outputs and trends on invertebrates and agriculture are scarce. In this paper, we adopted a bibliometric model to extract trends/research studies on invertebrates and agriculture between 1991 and 2022, using scholarly studies retrieved from the Web of Science (WoS) databank. Therefore, the aim of the study is to assess and analyse publications and findings on research studies/trends on invertebrates and agriculture. A total of 1201 articles were recovered from the WoS databank with average citations per doc and coauthors per document ratio of 31.22 and 4.79, respectively. Studies on invertebrates and agriculture research studies were positively correlated with the number of years (R2 = 0.7803; y = 3.4661x − 19.659) signifying an upsurge in the amount of publications on this topic in the near future. The United States maintained a top position in terms of published outputs (n = 312) and citations (n = 14,113), followed by Germany (n = 75; n = 3686) and the United Kingdom (n = 70; n = 3117), respectively. Articles from the United States (n = 67) and China (n = 32) had strong networks with other nations of the world. Top subject priorities in this research field in terms of author keywords are agriculture (n = 141), biodiversity (n = 66), arthropods (n = 66) and biological control/ecosystem services (n = 46). From our findings, economically stable nations such as the United States, Germany, China, the United Kingdom and Australia are carrying out more research on this subject matter compared to the developing countries. We also found out that from the thematic evolution and literature results, invertebrate research in the context of agriculture is tending towards biogeography, farmland biodiversity, insecticides and organic agriculture, which are of immense importance to scientists and researchers in this research domain, thus signifying the direction/path of future research.