Production and trends of scientific research on cactus pear in mainstream journals

Abstract

To identify production and trends on publications of cactus pear from 1900 to 2015 at aninternational level, a review of qualitatively and quantitatively indexed bibliographicrecords from Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Social Sciences Citation Index(SCIE) was conducted. The analyses included the concepts or key words ‘opuntia’ as wellas the common names of cactus pear and its variants. It was found that there were 1,472documents regarding cactus pear, from which 50% were published during the last tenyears, and more than 81% after 1990; these data show the relevance and dynamism ofcactus pear research during the last years. The most indexed type of document was thearticle with 86.1%. The preferred language of publication was English with 92.7%. TheInstitutions with more indexed documents were the university system of the University ofCalifornia and the National Autonomous University of Mexico with 99 (6.7%) and 84(5.7%) respectively. The Journal of the Professional Association for Cactus Development(JPACD) had the highest number of scientific articles (92). The impact factor (IF) ofJPACD is 0.22, and is ranked 30 among 33 in the “Horticulture” category of the Journal ofCitation Reports (JCR). Plant Physiology the journal with the highest IF (6.28) published29 of the indexed documents. The main research areas where scientists publishaccording to SCIE and SCCI are: Plant Sciences, Food Science Technology,Environmental Sciences, Horticulture, Ecology, Applied Chemistry, and Biochemistry andMolecular Biology. Mexico and the United States published 50% of all production, butTunisia, Brazil, France and South Korea had an important number of contributions onOpuntia. The main native English authors speaking with more published documents inmainstream journals are Nobel and Felker, while Saenz and Murillo-Amador are the mainnative Spanish speaking authors. The trending research in the last ten years are thefunctional properties and biological activity of active ingredients on Opuntia. The identifiedtrends would allow setting strategies, synergies and scientific and technologic policies forresearch and decision making in those countries where the species is considered asimportant.

Physicochemical properties of wild grown prickly pear fruits (Opuntia ficus-indica) in Yemen

“…The results in Table 3 show that the pH value of prickly pear pulp was 6.07. The pH value of prickly pear pulp obtained in this study was within the range reported by Reis et al (2018) in Portuguese prickly pear fruit varieties (6.03-6.47) and by El-Samahy et al (2006) and El-Samahy et al (2009) in yellow prickly pear pulp (6.00-6.14). It is similar to those reported by Mohammed et al (2014) for the pH in prickly pear fruits, which were 6.02.…”

“…It is also less than the value discovered by Bourhia et al (2020) for Moroccan prickly pear pulp varieties, which ranged from 281.98 to 582.91 in the 2015 and 2016 seasons, respectively. It is also lower than the results of El-Samahy et al (2009) for red prickly pear pulp, which was 224.07. These differences could be caused by differences in the stage of maturity, the environment, and the genotype of prickly pears.…”

“…A similar result was reported by Elshehy et al (2020) for the ascorbic acid content in prickly pear fruit juice from Egypt (26.76 mg/100 g). A lower value of ascorbic acid was obtained in previous studies (El-Samahy et al, 2006;El-Samahy et al, 2009;Mohammed et al, 2014;Roghelia & Panchal, 2016). A higher value of ascorbic acid was found by Jambi et al (2017) and Bareh et al (2012) in prickly pear fruit from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which was 32.75 and 32 mg/100 g, respectively.…”

“…This data shows that the titratable acidity of the prickly pear pulp from this study is the same as what was found in previous studies of prickly pear fruits from Morocco and Northern Morocco. But it was higher than those reported by Reis et al (2018) in prickly pear from Portugal (0.05 and 0.07%), Dehbi et al (2014) in prickly pear from Morocco (0.07%), El-Samahy et al (2009), andEl-Samahy et al (2006) in prickly pear pulp from Egypt (0.05%) and (0.05-0.06%), respectively. Gómez-Maqueo et al (2020) found 0.01% titratable acidity in Canary Island prickly pear fruit pulp.…”