Evaluating reuse of nontraditional water sources in agriculture and food production utilizing a scientometrics approach

Climate change is proving to be detrimental for agriculture and food production by depleting natural resources such as irrigation water. Researchers and growers are turning to alternative sources of irrigation water. Growers are potentially willing to accept nontraditional sources, provided they meet the chemical and microbial standards of existing sources. To help identify research gaps and suggest future research directions, a thorough analysis of existing literature needed to be done. The aim of this study was to categorize and analyze existing research on water reuse found on the Web of Science database using a scientometrics approach. The publication dataset comprising 3072 titles, published between 1990 and 2022, was analyzed for keywords and co-occurrence of commonly used phrase groups. The global and year-wise trends in publications were mapped and graphed to identify which countries were actively researching water reuse and whether the number of publications were progressing significantly per year. The highly cited publications were also analyzed for their content to understand what differentiated them from the other publications. Our results indicated that the numbers of publications have increased considerably over the years from 1990 to 2022 with a potential to further increase by 2060, indicating a growing interest in the area of water reuse. The global distribution of publications indicated that researchers across the globe have identified this as a potential future strategy and are actively working to understand various aspects of water reuse in agriculture and food production by using experimental and modeling based study methods. The current focus is on reclaimed water and roof harvested rainwater with other prospective sources being investigated. The findings indicate that a multidisciplinary approach is required to understand the multifaceted aspects of reusing nontraditional water sources as irrigation water for food crops. Based on our study, we suggest that collaborations between academic research, agricultural industries and government agencies could lead to the integration of nontraditional water sources as irrigation water, helping to alleviate the negative effects of climate change.