Millet research status and prospects for alleviating food insecurity through a text-mining approach

Abstract

In view of the celebration of the ‘International Year of Millets,’ millets are popularizing sustainable agricultural output amid challenging climates and nourishing adequately as food and feed. The extent of scientific intervention is the foundation for designing, promoting and popularizing neglected crops on social platforms. Planning future directions and adaptive strategies largely require regular evaluation of research efforts to identify hotspots and research gaps, as identified in the present study by creating a robust text-mining approach that integrates scientometrics using PubMed citation data. Keyword mining reveals that India and China are the leading publication centres on millets, possibly due to their large proportion of cultivation and indigenous nature. It further reveals that the pearl millet is the predominant one, followed by foxtail and finger millet, suggesting that most research is confined to them only; however, other millets, still have a research gap in comparison. The word abiotic stress is associated with high frequency in millet research due to its adaptive nature amid climate change. Thematic representation explored the novel concept of millet's utility as a probiotic and millet bran to ensure nutrient–cereal properties based on the persistency of keywords throughput research progression; however, incurious consumption is associated with harmful ochratoxin. Bio-concept mining and knowledge graph generation divided the millet research output into four large domains, which provides a largely covered bio-concepts for millet research and co-concurrence of emerging bio-concepts to intense progress and finds an adequate literature gap to improve millet research for sustained growth and equilibrate biodiversity.