Bibliometric Analysis of Integrated Pest Management Practices

Abstract

Integrated pest management (IPM) is a wide-ranging strategy that involves tactics for the structural control of pests and diseases, also known as integrated pest control (IPC). The prime aim of this study is to explore global scientific publications regarding integrated pest management and map the recent global trends in this innovative research domain, thereby providing future research directions based on dynamic observations. Bibliometric assessment is used in the research to provide a more detailed evaluation of the existing state of IPM, which will ultimately lead policymakers to develop novel measures to promote the efficient utilisation of the IPM measure. The study explores the Web of Science (WoS) core collection database covering published articles from 1993 to 2022, and we evaluated 1217 articles. The study employed the Biblioshiny app (V4.1, K-Synth, Naples, Italy), specially designed for the Bibliometrix R package, and a robust Java-based application, namely CiteSpace (V6.2.R3, Chaomei Chen, Philadelphia, PA, USA), to convert, process, visualise and evaluate the selected dataset. Moreover, we utilised another Java-based app VOSViewer (Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands), to provide a comprehensive visualisation. Based on citation analysis, we presented a list of the top 10 articles based on global citation count, the top 10 institutes, the top 10 journals, and the top 10 countries. By carefully evaluating the co-occurrence network, this study structurally represents the 9 clusters and the 20 prime keywords, which will be assisted the future researcher in understanding the key terms used by the prior research and the density criteria. The strategic coordinate mapping is utilised to evaluate the keywords’ inner relationship and provide strong themes of recent research progression of IPM by evaluating the centrality and density quadrant tactics. This technique has not been rehashed previously within the IPM domain. We identify gaps related to the formulation, implementation, and assessment of the IPM mechanisms and propose avenues for future studies to fill those gaps.