A bibliometric analysis of the essential oil-bearing plants exposed to the water stress: How long way we have come and how much further?

Water stress is of the most influential factors limiting plant growth and impairing plant metabolism and the stress conditions have been considered as an advantageous phenomenon and many studies regarding with water stress-induced essential oil changes have been performed. In most of the studies, essential oil and its compositional changes have been reported. However, quantitative data are lacking on the profile of published researches in water stress x essential oil interactions. The objective of the current study was to examine the profile of original and review articles under the topic of water stress and essential oil using bibliometric analysis. We identified 129 relevant and available peer-reviewed publications from 1992 to 2017 from the Scopus database. The retrieved documents were analyzed using VOSviewer. Based on the number of publications, Iran was the predominant country in publishing those documents, followed by India, Egypt and United States. The distribution of the frequency of authors and the number of their publications were fitted with the Lotka's Law. Kolmogorov Smirnov goodness-of-fit test results showed that there was no difference between theoretical (expected) and observed authors numbers. Furthermore, the Lamiaceae and Apiaceae families are the most studied plant groups. Of those plant families, basil (Ocimwn app.) and sage (Salvia spp.) species were more pronounced in the studies. According to the cluster results, three groups including terms associated with stress conditions, studied plant group, and secondary metabolites were determined. For the exogenous chemicals applied to improve stress-induced perturbations, salicylic acid was found to be most preferred and used as a growth regulator. Most articles were concentrated in several journals. In fact, almost a quarter of the document was published in only three journals namely, Industrial Crops and Products, Journal of Essential Oil-Bearing Plants and Scientia Horticulturae. These journals can be considered as the core journals for knowledge dissemination of essential oil content and its compositional alteration induced with water stress applications.