Bibliometric and social network analysis on the use of satellite imagery in agriculture: an entropy-based approach

Satellite imagery is gaining popularity as a valuable tool to lower the impact on natural resources and increase profits for farmers. The purpose of this study is twofold: to mine the scientific literature for revealing the structure of this research domain and to investigate to what extent scientific results are able to reach a wider public. To fulfill these, respectively, a Web of Science and a Twitter dataset were retrieved and analysed. Regarding academic literature, different performances of the various countries were observed: the USA and China resulted as the leading actors, both in terms of published papers and employed researchers. Among the categorised keywords, "resolution", "Landsat", "yield", "wheat" and "multispectral" are the most used. Then, analysing the semantic network of the words used in the various abstracts, the different facets of the research in satellite remote sensing were detected. It emerged the importance of retrieving meteorological parameters through remote sensing and the broad use of vegetation indexes. As emerging topics, classification tasks for land use assessment and crop recognition stand out, together with the use of hyperspectral sensors. Regarding the interaction of academia with the public, the analysis showed that it is practically absent on Twitter: most of the activity therein is due to private companies advertising their business. Therefore, there is still a communication gap between academia and actors from other societal sectors.