Characteristics of high-impact agronomic journals

Agronomy journals form a core part of the process of scholarly communication and scientific research in the agronomic field. Determining the key features of high-impact agronomic journals will be a central component for identifying the disciplinary development in the field of agronomy. In this study, we conducted a bibliometric study to fill this knowledge gap based on 64,703 articles published in 18 main agronomy journals since 1948 derived from the Scopus database. Our main findings were that (a) over 20% of publications in Advances in Agronomy and Agricultural and Forest Meteorology received more than 50 citations; (b) authors from the United States, China, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia published the most articles in these journals, comprising 22.4, 11.5, 10.7, 8.7, and 8.0% of the total number of publications, respectively; and (c) journals published in a given country had a greater number of papers published by authors of that country than by authors of other countries. Furthermore, three clusters for these 18 journals were identified that included the topics of agronomy, interactions between agronomy and soil sciences, and interactions between agronomy and plant sciences. The results of this study provide valuable insights regarding the current state of and future development trends in agronomic journals.