The Evolution of Agricultural Holdings – Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

The survey of the structure of farms is carried out by all the member states of the European Union, with agricultural holding as the statistical unit of measure. Thus, all the member states of the European Union are based on the definition of agricultural exploitation where it is mentioned that “agricultural exploitation means a single unit, both from a technical and economic point of view, with a single management, which carries out its agricultural activities on the economic territory of the EU, either as a primary activity or as a secondary activity”. The purpose of the paper is to highlight the evolution and importance of studying agriculture, more specifically agricultural holdings, by performing a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the specialized literature. Thus, to achieve the proposed goal, the web of science database was accessed in order to perform a bibliometric analysis. Thus, following the application of the bibliometric analysis, it can be argued that this sector has been given considerable interest, as evidenced by the high number of articles published recently, regarding the analysis of agricultural holdings. By querying the mentioned database, 26,804 scientific articles were found after the phrase “agricultural farms”. Most such papers were published by authors from the US (28.4% of the total number of papers) and China (18.7% of the total number of papers) in the Journal of agricultural and food chemistry (1.52%) and Acta horticulture (1.39%). Because this topic of agricultural holdings is vast and many countries are involved in approaching it in different ways, further studies are recommended on analyzing the evolution and importance of agricultural holdings in different countries and identifying the discrepancies between them.