Global Trends in Astrobiology Research: Bibliometric and Visualization Studies

Abstract

R. Santhakumar

Astrobiology is an interdisciplinary scientific field composed of a range of subjects that have developed dramatically over the last few decades. However, there is little research on astrobiology from the perspectives of bibliometrics and visual- ization. The scientific research on the basic aspects of astrobiology itself is also rare. This study aims to comprehensively examine the astrobiology research field by conducting a bibliometric analysis if 1,848 publications between 2012 and 2021 from the Web of Science database. The findings showed that the USA, Germany, England and France are the most pro- ductive countries on astrobiology. Cockell, C S is the most influential author, and astrobiology researchers host universities are mainly from the USA, France and Germany. Articles appeared in 285 journals and were cited nearly 34300 times. Astronomy and astrophysics are the most preferred categories to publish based on Web of Science subject categories. The findings shows that field specialized journals were having publish high research as compared to multidisciplinary journals. Since the number of studies involved in this field has been found to be less, efforts should be undertaken to strengthen the research on astrobiology to explore the wide range of its applications. This article calls for greater engagements among researchers to more explicitly consider how their work might contribute to the understanding challenges in this field.

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