Agricultural science: a CiteSpace-based bibliometric analysis of global and Chinese research

In the face of global population growth, climate volatility and mounting ecological pressures, agricultural science is shifting from traditional yield-centered paradigms toward integrated, sustainable development models. This study employs CiteSpace (version 6.1.5) to conduct a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of 1780 scholarly publications on agricultural science research from 2000 to 2024, drawn from both the Web of Science and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) databases. By adopting a systematic process of article selection as represented by the PRISMA flowchart, the dataset was refined through rigorous inclusion and exclusion criteria to ensure analytical robustness. CiteSpace, a powerful visualization and analysis tool, and VOSviewer were used to conduct keyword co-occurrence mapping, cluster analysis, temporal evolution modeling and institutional collaboration analysis. The results reveal three dominant global research themes: climate change adaptation, agricultural system resilience and technological innovation. Global trends augment precision agriculture, carbon management and digitalization. Chinese studies continue to focus on yield increment and improvement of principal crops, underlined by the growing application of smart agriculture, ecological administration and rural revitalization policies. Institutional research finds Jiangsu University to be an essential node in China's agricultural science network. By synthesizing cross-regional, bilingual datasets, this study offers new evidence for the converging but also diverging paths of agricultural research worldwide and in China. Such evidence is supportive of the use of evidence-based policy making, academic strategy and innovative agricultural reform in the context of sustainable development. © 2025 Society of Chemical Industry.