Abstract
Italy has a fragmented reality with an extremely rich and diverse territory; however, it has nowadays started to embrace precision farming techniques and several research activities are being carried out. This study followed a survey proposed by the Italian Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies (Mipaaf) promoted to explore and evidence weaknesses and strengths of the Italian panorama regarding precision farming researches and studies. The survey interested all the Italian Research Institutes and Universities, which include agricultural aspects within their missions.This study aims at conducting the first term mapping analysis of the precision agriculture research in Italy to elucidate its research structure. We applied a science mapping approach based on co-terms and citations analyses to a set of scientific publications retrieved from the Elsevier’s Scopus database over the period 2000–2016. The key terms used for the Scopus search were “precision agriculture, precision farming, precision viticulture, precision forestry and precision aquaculture”. The Scopus search retrieved 800 research papers and reviews published by 118 peer-reviewed journals. The total number of publications was around 21.2% (N = 170) during the cumulative period 2000–2009 and they exponentially increase reaching 18% (N = 150) on 2015 (it must be considered that for 2016 Scopus do not yet complete the publications input). The term mapping approach on precision agriculture papers from Italian authors produced a term map showing 4 well separated clusters. Each cluster groups together close scientific investigated topics. The first one is based on technology; within this cluster is possible to observe terms linked to food, sensors and animal farming (evident sub-cluster). The second cluster is related with indices and algorithmic approaches. The third one is related to spatial variability and soil related terms. The fourth and smaller one, between the first and the second, regards viticulture related terms.
