Plant- and algae-derived bioactive compounds as agricultural bioinputs: a global bibliometric and semantic analysis (2020–2025)
Abstract
Plant- and algae-derived bioactive compounds have emerged as promising alternatives for sustainable agriculture due to their multifunctional roles as biostimulants, biopesticides, biofertilizers and crop-protection agents. Despite growing scientific interest in these natural products, research remains fragmented across several disciplines, which makes major trends and emerging themes difficult to identify. This study analysed global scientific production on such compounds used as agricultural bioinputs through bibliometric and semantic analyses of Scopus-indexed literature published between 2020 and 2025. A search of the TITLE-ABS-KEY field, whose complete equation is reported, followed by structured screening and eligibility assessment against predefined criteria, produced a final corpus of 189 publications. The indicators comprised annual production, document types, countries, journals, citation performance, keyword co-occurrence, journal dispersion, author productivity, international collaboration, bibliographic coupling and a strategic map. Annual output increased from seven documents in 2020 to 69 in 2025, with India, Italy, and Spain being the main contributors. Semantic network analysis identified 24 author keywords, above a threshold of five occurrences, distributed across four thematic clusters: botanical biopesticides, sustainable agriculture, seaweed-derived biostimulants, and plant extracts associated with abiotic-stress mitigation. Journal dispersion was compatible with Bradford’s law (k = 3.24; χ² = 2.94; p > 0.05), whereas author productivity followed an inverse power law with an exponent of α = 4.21, considerably steeper than the classical Lotka value of 2, which was rejected by the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. The results clarify the intellectual structure of the field, identify emerging trends and reveal opportunities for research supporting the development of plant- and algae-derived bioinputs for sustainable agriculture.