Research on impact of drought on plants from 2018 to 2022 in China: A bibliometric and visual analysis

【Objective】 Drought is an abiotic stress affecting crop growth the most in central and northern China. Tremendous research has been conducted over the past decades to understand the response of plants to drought and develop mitigation methods to ameliorate its detrimental effect. In this paper, we analyze the research processes, research hotspots, perspectives on advancing drought management practices in China. 【Method】 The analysis is based on papers published from 2018 to 2022. We used the Citespace and VOSviewer software to analyze the papers indexed by China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and Web of Science (WOS). Our analysis focused on research that investigated the impact of drought on plant growth, physiological processes, and gene expression. The keywords used for search in CNKI were ‘salt tolerance’, ‘seedling stage’, and ‘drought resistance identification’, while those used for research in WOS were ‘ascorbate peroxidase’, ‘water use’, and ‘ectopic expression’. 【Result】 Researches on the effect of drought on plants in China over the last five years predominantly focused on four areas: impact of drought stress on morphology and anatomy of leaves, effects of drought stress on photosynthetic characteristics of plants, effects of drought stress on osmotic regulation substances and antioxidant enzymes in plants, effects of drought stress on genetic expression in plants. Current research in this area is the identification and transfer of drought-resistance genes to plants which are prone to drought or drought-salt stress. The two research hotspots are application of nanomaterials to alleviate the impact of drought stress on plants, and applying multi-omics joint analysis (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics) and advanced technologies such as transgenic techniques, gene editing, gene silencing to enhance the resistance of plants to drought. 【Conclusion】 Research on the impact of drought on plants in China over the past five years is diverse, ranging from developing techniques to ameliorate its detrimental influence to understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying the response of plants to drought stress.