Research hot spots and trends on the impacts of global agricultural production on groundwater in the past two decades

More than 90% of global groundwater exploitation is used for agricultural production, and groundwater has become an important strategic resource concerning global food security. Hence, understanding the research hot spots and the trends on the impacts of global agricultural production on groundwater is critical for sustainable irrigated agricultural development and groundwater resource protection and utilization. The article is based on China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) core journal database and Web of Science (WoS) database, the CiteSpace tool was employed to analyze the research papers concerning the impacts of agricultural production on groundwater globally from 2000 to 2020. This study aimed to summarize the frontier, hot spots, and trends of the research field in the past two decades. The results indicated that in the study of the impact of agricultural production on groundwater, the average annual increases of the number of CNKI and WoS papers reached 1.45 and 53.7, respectively. The United States and China were the leading countries in the research field on the impact of agricultural production on groundwater, accounting for 24.94% and 15.70% of published papers, respectively. Among the major research institutions in the world, Chinese Academy of Sciences was the most internationally influential academic institution. The themes of non-point agricultural pollution and groundwater health risk assessment both were the research hot spots worldwide, and would continue to be the hot research topics under the background of population increase, water resource shortage, food crisis and global climate change. Groundwater overexploitation was an important research theme in the field of the impacts of global agricultural production on groundwater, and the highly cited papers by experts Scanlon and Taylor et al were the most influential papers in this research field.