Visual analysis of fruit harvesting machine based on CiteSpace

【Objective】In the context of the acceleration of agricultural modernization, the development of fruit harvesting machinery is of great significance for improving the production efficiency of fruit industry and reducing labor costs. The purpose of this study was to comprehensively and deeply understand the frontier hotspots and future development trends of fruit harvesting machinery, and to clearly present the overall situation of this field for relevant researchers, and to point out the follow-up research direction.【Methods】We selected the research literatures published in the Web of Science core database from 1994 to 2024, which were closely related to the field of fruit harvesting machinery, as the data source. With the help of visual analysis software Citespace v6.1.6R, the data of 838 English literatures were analyzed in terms of the number of published papers, authors, institutions, countries, journals, etc., and the visual images of co-occurrence network and density map were completed. Then, the similarity and measurement of knowledge units, the relationship between each unit, the key path and knowledge inflection point in the research field were obtained, and the future development of the field and its research hotspots, frontiers and trends were predicted.【Results】From the perspective of annual publication volume, the research on forest fruit harvesting machinery was in a stage of steady development, and its annual publication volume showed a good trend of increasing year by year, compared with 1994, the number of publications in 2023 increased by 175, with a growth rate of 17500%, demonstrating thatthe field was increasingly concerned and valued by the academic and industry. Among the 56 research countries involved, the countries with the largest number of publications were China and USA. Among them, although China had a large number of publications, the intermediary centrality of the United States was as high as 0.82, compared with China’s 0.38, indicating that the influence of the research results of the United States in this field was more prominent, and there was still much room for improvement in the degree of research cooperation between countries, and the cooperative relationship was not close enough. At the level of research institutions, 6 of the top ten research institutions were from China, and most of them were universities. Northwest A & F University standed out among many universities, and the number of publications ranked first, reflecting the positive investment and important contribution of Chinese universities in the field of fruit harvesting machinery research to a certain extent. At the same time, it also showed that the colleges and universities had a very high influence in this field and played a huge role in the development of fruit harvesting machinery. Based on the trend of international scientific and technological development, we should continue to strengthen the scientific research cooperation among universities, scientific research institutions and enterprises to promote the transformation of scientific and technological achievements. From the analysis of the author 's co-occurrence, a certain number of research groups had been gradually formed in this field. However, unfortunately, the cooperation and communication between the groups were relatively rare. The cooperation between authors in the same region was more frequent and close, but the intensity of cross-border and cross-regional cooperation was significantly weaker than that in the same region. According to statistics, there were 63 core authors with more than 4 articles, accounting for only 9.97% of the total number of authors. According to the calculation of Price formula, a stable and influential core author group had not yet been formed in this field. The number of publications in the top 10 journals has reached more than 20. Among them, the TOP journal“Computers and Electronics in Agriculture”in agricultural and forestry science 1 area was extremely prominent, with a total of 140 articles, accounting for more than 16% of the total number of articles, ranking first with a significant advantage, far exceeding other published journals. Through keyword analysis, it was found that high- frequency keywords such as“mechanical harvesting”and“machine vision”belonged to this field. The current research hotspots mainly focused on“fruit detection”,“machine vision”,“deep learning”, etc.. The emergence and development of these hot technologies indicated that the field of fruit harvesting machinery was moving towards the direction of intelligence, informatization and integration.【Conclusion】To sum up, in order to promote the research in the field of fruit harvesting machinery to achieve more remarkable results, scholars from various countries urgently need to strengthen cooperation and exchanges in many aspects, actively broaden the breadth and depth of research, and work together to jointly promote the sustainable development and innovative breakthroughs in this field. The research results would provide strong support for relevant researchers to deeply understand the research status of this field from the macro level, and provide valuable reference for its exploration in the future development direction and the practice of technological innovation.