The Digital Agricultural Revolution: a Bibliometric Analysis Literature Review

The application of digital technologies in agriculture can improve traditional practices to adapt to climate changes, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and promote a sustainable intensification for food security. The terms Smart Agriculture, Digital Agriculture, and Agriculture 4.0 are used in the literature to describe the digitalization of agricultural practices. Some authors argued that we are experiencing a Digital Agricultural Revolution (DAR) that will boost sustainable farming. Nevertheless, there is no clear and commonly accepted definition of the DAR-related terms, and it is not even evident which are the technological pillars supporting the DAR. To find evidence of the DAR's on-going process, we investigated the scientific literature with bibliometric analysis tools to produce an objective and reproducible literature review. We retrieved 4995 articles by querying the Web of Science database in the timespan 2012-2019, and we analyzed the obtained dataset to answer three specific research questions: i) what is the spectrum of the DAR-related terminology?; ii) what are the key articles and the most influential authors, journals, institutions, and countries?; iii) what are the main research streams and the emerging topics? By grouping the authors' keywords reported on publications, we identified five main research streams: Climate-Smart Agriculture, Site-Specific Management, Remote Sensing, Internet of Things, and Machine Learning. To provide a broad overview of each of these topics, we analyzed relevant review articles, and we present here the main achievements and the on-going challenges. Finally, we showed the trending topics of the last three years (2017, 2018, 2019).