Agriculture IoT: Emerging Trends, Cooperation Networks, and Outlook

The arrival of the IoT era has been revolutionizing various fields of our current world. Precision agriculture is recognized as one sustainable, eco-friendly, and profitable mode to improve agriculture yields and quality, and will ultimately come true with the further implementation of IoT techniques in agriculture. To facilitate the implementation, we make a visualization review of the agriculture IoT literature in the last decade, using records of 3168 documents and their 100,205 references in Web of Science. The dynamics of research fronts and intellectual bases bring out emerging trends in both applied IoT techniques and topics of concern in agriculture. Based on the quantity of contributions in the cooperation networks, outstanding countries, institutions, and authors are detected. Moreover, influential studies and scholars are recognized from the citation networks, indicating hot research and trends in the agriculture IoT literature from 2009 to 2018. Through the review, we also propose future recommendations including construction of agriculture IoT infrastructures, data security and data sharing, sustainable energy solutions, economic analysis and operation management in agriculture IoT, and IoT-based agriculture financing and e-business modes. These results are helpful for scholars and practitioners to make further efforts on achieving IoT-based precision agriculture.