Abstract
Climate change has a significant impact on both the composition of plant groups and the efficiency of ecosystems. Plant phenology is one of the most accurate bioindicators of ongoing climate change because it is heavily influenced by the climate. We conducted a bibliometric analysis of the scientific literature from the last three decades to understand better the current state, hotspots, and development trends in the field of climate change adaptation and its impact on plant phenology. The Scopus database was used to retrieve research articles published on climate change affecting plant phenology. VOSviewer, and RStudio bibliometrix were used to visualize the contribution of countries, journals, institutions, current trends, analysis of keywords, and collaboration of countries and authors. We analyzed a total of 683 articles published from 1992 to 2022. The publication rate is 17.06%, indicating that the number of publications is expected to rise in the future. The USA, Canada, and China were the main contributors, and Cristian Rixen is the most productive author with 13 articles. The maximum number of articles comes under the three subject areas including Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Environmental Sciences, and Earth and Planetary Sciences. “Global Change Biology” is the most relevant journal in our analysis with the highest number of documents, and the “Chinese Academy of Sciences” is the most prolific institution. The growth rates are relatively low on a global level, even though there is increasing collaboration in this field. Our keyword analysis using VOSviewer suggested future research directions and generated six different significant themes. Our novel bibliometric analysis of plant phenological research will help researchers better grasp the state of climate change adaptation and the behavior of plant phenology, and provide ideas for further exploration.
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Data Availability
The data that support the finding of this investigation are freely available on Scopus data base.
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Prabhakar Semwal thankful to Prof. David W. Inouye (Department of Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA) for his suggestions on earlier draft of the manuscript.
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Pooja Singh: Data curation, analysis, and first draft preparation; Baby Gargi: Data curation, analysis, and first draft preparation; Prabhakar Semwal: Conceptualization, project administration, review and edit; Susheel Verma: Review and edit.
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Singh, P., Gargi, B., Semwal, P. et al. Global research and research progress on climate change and their impact on plant phenology: 30 years of investigations through bibliometric analysis. Theor Appl Climatol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-024-04919-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-024-04919-5