Digital Agriculture: Mapping Knowledge Structure and Trends

With the advancement of digital technologies, digital agriculture improves agricultural efficiency and sustainability, reducing resource waste and environmental burden. Hence, DA has emerged as a new catalyst for grain productivity and a driving force behind climate improvement, with broad prospects. However, digital agriculture is still in its early stage in most countries and there are few systematic reviews. In China, for example, there were only 3 non-core reviews out of 817 literatures on DA. Meanwhile, the use of Citespace is revolutionary as it leverages data visualization to uncover hidden patterns and relationships within literatures, aiding researchers in achieving their objectives. This study aims to address this research gap by using Citespace to produce a non-subjective and testable review on DA. In this study, we collected 2264 literatures by retrieving the WoS database in the timespan 1997-2022. The results show that 1) over time, the annual number of publications on DA has gradually increased and the research can be roughly divided into three stages: start-up, steady development, and rapid development stage; 2) research streams of DA can be further divided into six categories: Remote Sensing, Climate-Smart Agriculture, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, Big Data and System Integration; 3) development of research frontiers could be divided into three parts: “exploration of digital agriculture technologies,” “operation management of digital agriculture” and “limitations of digital agriculture;” 4) future research should pay more attention to the innovation and scientific evaluation of digital technology and operation management. Also, effective DA policies should be put forward to provide a theoretical basis and decision-making reference.