Mapping Research Trends in Satellite Imagery Applications for Agriculture: A Bibliometric Analysis
Journal of Smart and Sustainable Farming
Received On : 15 September 2025
Revised On : 02 November 2025
Accepted On : 06 November 2025
Published On : 30 November 2025
Volume 01, 2025
Pages : 215-223
Abstract
This research involves wide-ranging bibliometric research pertaining to the application of satellite images in agriculture from the late 1970s to the middle of 2025. Data from the Web of Science database were analyzed to understand the trends in publications, the patterns of citations, and the research in different parts of the world. Publications of different years were analyzed in order to understand the impact of major countries and to rank the journals based on productivity and impact. After 2017, there was a significant increase in research, and the USA, China and India were all major contributors in terms of the number of researchers and publications. Some study impact was not as good as expected based on the number of publications, while in others it was. The remote sensing field is largely dominated by IEEE journals which have a very high average citation rate per paper published.
Keywords
Satellite Imagery, Remote Sensing, Agriculture, Bibliometric Analysis, Citation Impact, Research Trends, Web of Science, IEEE Journals.
- J.-L. Pfund et al., “Understanding and Integrating Local Perceptions of Trees and Forests into Incentives for Sustainable Landscape Management,” Environmental Management, vol. 48, no. 2, pp. 334–349, Jun. 2011, doi: 10.1007/s00267-011-9689-1.
- N. Heiss, J. Meier, U. Gessner, and C. Kuenzer, “A review: Potential of Earth Observation (EO) for Mapping Small-Scale agriculture and Cropping Systems in West Africa,” Land, vol. 14, no. 1, p. 171, Jan. 2025, doi: 10.3390/land14010171.
- M. Boschetti, D. Stroppiana, P. A. Brivio, and S. Bocchi, “Multi-year monitoring of rice crop phenology through time series analysis of MODIS images,” International Journal of Remote Sensing, vol. 30, no. 18, pp. 4643–4662, Aug. 2009, doi: 10.1080/01431160802632249.
- S. M. Samborski, N. Tremblay, and E. Fallon, “Strategies to make use of Plant Sensors‐Based diagnostic information for nitrogen recommendations,” Agronomy Journal, vol. 101, no. 4, pp. 800–816, Jul. 2009, doi: 10.2134/agronj2008.0162rx.
- T. Miller et al., “Integrating Artificial Intelligence Agents with the Internet of Things for Enhanced Environmental Monitoring: Applications in Water Quality and Climate Data,” Electronics, vol. 14, no. 4, p. 696, Feb. 2025, doi: 10.3390/electronics14040696.
- G. P. O. Reddy, “Satellite Remote sensing Sensors: Principles and applications,” in Geotechnologies and the environment, 2018, pp. 21–43. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-78711-4_2.
- F. H. Goetz, “Three decades of hyperspectral remote sensing of the Earth: A personal view,” Remote Sensing of Environment, vol. 113, pp. S5–S16, Apr. 2009, doi: 10.1016/j.rse.2007.12.014.
- R. Lottering, K. Peerbhay, and S. Adelabu, “Remote sensing applications in agricultural, earth and environmental sciences,” Applied Sciences, vol. 15, no. 8, p. 4537, Apr. 2025, doi: 10.3390/app15084537.
- B. Hejmanowska and P. Kramarczyk, “Assessing land cover changes using the LUCAS database and Sentinel Imagery: a comparative analysis of accuracy metrics,” Applied Sciences, vol. 15, no. 1, p. 240, Dec. 2024, doi: 10.3390/app15010240.
- F. A. F. Sham, A. El-Shafie, W. Z. W. Jaafar, A. S, M. Sherif, and A. M. A. N. Ahmed, “Advances in AI-based rainfall forecasting: a comprehensive review of past, present, and future directions with intelligent data fusion and climate change models,” Results in Engineering, vol. 27, p. 105774, Jun. 2025, doi: 10.1016/j.rineng.2025.105774.
- K. Shukla, R. Shree, and J. Narayan, “Combining Fusion-Based thresholding and Non-Linear diffusion for improved speckle noise mitigation in SAR images,” Applied Sciences, vol. 14, no. 19, p. 8985, Oct. 2024, doi: 10.3390/app14198985.
- Brisco, R. J. Brown, T. Hirose, H. McNairn, and K. Staenz, “Precision Agriculture and the Role of Remote Sensing: a review,” Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 315–327, Sep. 1998, doi: 10.1080/07038992.1998.10855254.
- R. P. Sishodia, R. L. Ray, and S. K. Singh, “Applications of Remote Sensing in Precision Agriculture: a review,” Remote Sensing, vol. 12, no. 19, p. 3136, Sep. 2020, doi: 10.3390/rs12193136.
- T. Adão et al., “Hyperspectral Imaging: A review on UAV-Based sensors, data processing and applications for agriculture and forestry,” Remote Sensing, vol. 9, no. 11, p. 1110, Oct. 2017, doi: 10.3390/rs9111110.
- R. O.-D. Cruz, “Perceptions of higher agricultural education toward sustainable agricultural development,” Higher Education Skills and Work-based Learning, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 187–202, Oct. 2019, doi: 10.1108/heswbl-06-2019-0080.
- L. Zhang and L. Zhang, “Artificial Intelligence for Remote Sensing Data Analysis: A review of challenges and opportunities,” IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 270–294, Apr. 2022, doi: 10.1109/mgrs.2022.3145854.
- B. Y. S. Sabas, K. G. Danmo, K. A. T. Madeleine, and B. Jan, “Cocoa Production and Forest Dynamics in Ivory Coast from 1985 to 2019,” Land, vol. 9, no. 12, p. 524, Dec. 2020, doi: 10.3390/land9120524.
- Tahamtan and L. Bornmann, “What do citation counts measure? An updated review of studies on citations in scientific documents published between 2006 and 2018,” Scientometrics, vol. 121, no. 3, pp. 1635–1684, Sep. 2019, doi: 10.1007/s11192-019-03243-4.
- R. Van Der Merwe, “Stuart Kauffman’s metaphysics of the adjacent possible: a critique,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, vol. 48, no. 1, pp. 49–61, Nov. 2022, doi: 10.1080/03080188.2022.2125614.
- A. T. Machado, C. M. A. Pinto, and A. M. Lopes, “A review on the characterization of signals and systems by power law distributions,” Signal Processing, vol. 107, pp. 246–253, Mar. 2014, doi: 10.1016/j.sigpro.2014.03.003.
CRediT Author Statement
The authors confirm contribution to the paper as follows:
Conceptualization: Arulmurugan Ramu; Methodology: Albin Hodza; Software: Arulmurugan Ramu; Data Curation: Arulmurugan Ramu; Writing- Original Draft Preparation: Albin Hodza and Arulmurugan Ramu; Visualization: Albin Hodza; Investigation: Arulmurugan Ramu; Supervision: Arulmurugan Ramu; Validation: Albin Hodza and Arulmurugan Ramu; Writing- Reviewing and Editing: Albin Hodza and Arulmurugan Ramu; All authors reviewed the results and approved the final version of the manuscript.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Reviewers for taking the time and effort necessary to review the manuscript. We sincerely appreciate all valuable comments and suggestions, which helped us to improve the quality of the manuscript.
Funding
No funding was received to assist with the preparation of this manuscript.
Ethics Declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.
Availability of Data and Materials
The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Author Information
Contributions
All authors have equal contribution in the paper and all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Corresponding Author
Rights and permissions
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
This license permits unrestricted use, sharing, distribution, reproduction, and adaptation in any medium or format, including for commercial purposes, provided that appropriate credit is given to the original author(s) and the source, a link to the license is provided, and any changes made are indicated.
Copyright
© 2025 Albin Hodza and Arulmurugan Ramu. The author(s) retain copyright of the work. The author(s) grant the Journal of Smart and Sustainable Farming (JSSF) and its publisher, Ansis Publications, the right of first publication and the right to identify itself as the original publisher of the article.
Cite this Article
Albin Hodza and Arulmurugan Ramu, “Mapping Research Trends in Satellite Imagery Applications for Agriculture: A Bibliometric Analysis”, Journal of Smart and Sustainable Farming, pp. 215-223, 2025, doi: 10.64026/JSSF/2025021.