An Investigation of Meteorological Drought Studies on a Global Scale Using a Bibliometric Analysis

• Published in: Journal of innovative science and engineering Vol. 6; no. 1; pp. 76 - 93
• Main Authors: YILMAZ, Mustafa Utku, YILMAZ, Hülya
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bursa Technical University 01.06.2022
• Subjects: bibliometric analysis; drought; meteorological drought; scopus; vosviewer
• ISSN: 2602-4217; 2602-4217
• DOI: 10.38088/jise.993473

In this study, meteorological drought-related studies (drought analysis, drought monitoring, and drought prediction) published between 1980 and 2021, which are based on the Scopus database, were comprehensively investigated using bibliometric analysis. 1346 publications were assessed according to several indicators including publication types, year of publication, countries, journals, authors, keywords, the title of publication, and the number of citations. The results of the analysis were visualized with the VOSviewer software. The results indicated that the number of publications increased gradually from 2013 to 2018, followed by a sharp increase from 2019 to 2020. This shows that the importance of studies in the field of meteorological drought on a global scale has increased considerably in recent years. However, about 77% of the authors published only one publication in the investigated period. Results of Lotka’s law, Price’s law, and Pareto’s law revealed that there were very few highly productive authors. China and the United States were the first two countries among 117 countries in terms of the number of publications they produce. Turkey was the ninth country in the ranking of the countries with the highest number of publications with 46. The journal that published the most publications in this field is the Journal of Hydrology with 53 publications. The most-cited journal was Water Resources Management with 1710 citations. The increase in the number of publications after 2019 was also reflected in the number of citations. About 60% of the total number of citations in the investigated period were in the last 3 years. This shows that many researchers have recently drawn their attention to this field recently. This also indicates that studies on meteorological drought will increasingly continue. These findings will serve as an instructive guide for researchers in this field.