Plant Resistance to Fungal Pathogens: Bibliometric Analysis and Visualization

Abstract

Plants are susceptible to fungal pathogen infection, threatening plant growth and development. Researchers worldwide have conducted extensive studies to address this issue and have published numerous articles on the subject, but they lack a scientometric evaluation. This study analyzed international research on the topic “Plant resistance to fungal pathogens” between 2008 and 2021, using the core database of the Web of Science (WoS). By searching the subject words “Plants”, “Disease Resistance”, and “Fungal Pathogens”, we received 6687 articles. Bibliometric visualization software analyzes the most published countries, institutions, journals, authors, the most cited articles, and the most common keywords. The results show that the number of articles in the database has increased year by year, with the United States and China occupying the core positions, accounting for 46.16% of the total published articles worldwide. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is the main publishing organization. Wang Guoliang is the author with the most published articles, and the Frontiers in Plant Science ranks first in published articles. The research on plant anti-fungal pathogens is booming, and international exchanges and cooperation need to be further strengthened. This paper summarizes five possible research ideas, from fungal pathogens, gene editing technology, extraction of secondary metabolites from plants as anti-fungal agents, identification of related signal pathways, fungal molecular databases, and development of nanomaterials, to provide data for related research.

Keywords

• Web of Science
• fungal pathogens
• plant resistance
• diseases