International Comparison Of Soybean Research Level

China is the home of soybean, and it has been a net export country for a long time. Yet the supply anddemand of soybeans in China have dramatically changed since the year of1996, when the the import ofsoybean exceeded the export for the first time in the country due to increased demands for soybean oiland soybean meal. The soybean self-sufficient rate rapidly decreased from the47.6%of2003to15.0%of2013. It is the critical period to promote the soybean industry in China. Considering the constrainedcultivated land areas, the improvement of soybean yield is one of the best ways to increase the soybeanproduction. In this case the development of soybean science and technology attracted more extensiveconcern.We compared the soybean research levels of USA, Brazil, Argentina, China and India using bibliometricanalysis. The soybean related articles retrieved in the WOS database and CNKI database during1995-2013were analyzed from the aspects of institutions, authors, most cited articles, categories,journals and article quality. Literature co-citation timeline maps associated with soybean research weregenerated by CiteSpace III information visualization software, and it directly demonstrated the soybeanresearch forefront. USDA and Iowa State University were set as the benchmark organizations, and thecase analysis was carried out to determine the soybean research levels of different organization types.The results indicated that a total of17576soybean research articles from122countries were retrieved,with36190authors belonging to5879organizations. The number of articles increased year by year ingeneral.USA, Brazil, China, Japan, and South Korea ranked the top five counties by the number of articles, andthe top five counties by the total citation were USA, Japan, China, Brazil, and Canada. Based on theaverage citation rate, the top five countries were the United Kingdom, France, Australia, Germany, andUSA. Considering the weighed indicators, USA, Japan, China, Brazil, and Canada ranked the top five,which can be classified as the dominant countries in soybean related research.Among the top20organizations by the number of articles,12come from USA, suggesting the leadingrole of USA. The other organizations include four from Brazil, two from Canada, one from China, andone from Japan, respectively. And the top20authors by the number of articles include11from USA,three from Canada, two from Japan, two from China, one from Brazil, and one from South Korea.Hartman GL from USA published the most articles in the world.The paper entitled “Genome sequence of the palaeopolyploid soybean” has the highest citation, with atotal of646citation in WOS database and1014in Google Scholar. Among the top20articles by citation,15were published by American researchers, including8of them ranked top10. This indicated theinternational impact of USA in soybean research. To the present, no articles from China, Brazil, India orArgentina ranked top20by citation.The averaged impact factor for the top20journals by publication number of the world is2.024. Theaveraged impact factor for the top20journals by publication number of China is2.418. And that for USA, Brazil, India and Argentina were2.313,0.712,1.319, and1.884, respectively.USA had121disciplines associated with soybean research and Brazil83, China104, India60, andArgentina58. Comparison of the top20disciplines with highest publication suggested that there was asimilar discipline distribution of soybean research between these countries in spite of the differentstarting point and changing patter for each discipline.USA is the leading counties for soybean research, and Brazil closely follows the world research frontalthough it lags behind in molecular biology field. Argentina focused on cultivation and physiology,quality and processing. India paid more attention to soybean soil nutrition. China conducted a lot ofresearch on soybean processing, soybean transgenic techniques, molecular biology, soybean physiology,and soybean meal, but limited efforts were put on plant protection and biodiesel.We concluded that the world has witnessed a rapid development in soybean research, represented by awide coverage of categories, and a high level of quantity and quality of the research articles. USA ranksfirst for soybean research level in the world. China takes second in the world in terms of publicationnumber, but the number of high-impacted research organization, researchers and articles wasinsufficient. It was proposed that more efforts should be put on soybean research in China to improve itsinternational influence.