Relationships between soil salinity and economic dynamics: Main highlights from literature

Abstract

Soil characteristics often have an impact on a farm’s competitiveness and on the quality of the agricultural goods obtained through farming activities. The quality of these products leads to social consequences, namely because of its impact on human health. Considering these contexts and the pertinence of these issues, in this study the intention is to highlight the several dimensions related to soil salinity and the respective economic dynamics. To achieve these objectives, several documents were considered from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS) and Scopus for search topics associated with these issues (soil salinity and economic dynamics). The metadata obtained from the two databases for these documents was first benchmarked. After this initial benchmarking to identify the main differences between WoS and Scopus, these documents were analysed through bibliometric approaches and later exploited using a literature review. An alternative approach to carrying out systematic reviews in the presence of a great number of documents (methodology based on benchmarking of metadata, from scientific databases, and bibliometric assessment and analysis) was suggested. The results show that the strategies for dealing with the soil salinity and the concerns for food security, desertification, climate change, nitrogen management, and plant osmoregulation deserved special attention from the researchers. In turn, the direct assessment of the socioeconomic impacts from soil salinity, or the impacts on several dimensions of sustainability motived fewer studies.

Keywords

• web of science
• scopus
• bibliometric analysis
• centrality metrics
• systematic review