A Multi-dimensional Scientometrics Analysis on Alfalfa Research

Alfalfa is known as “the king of forage”. It not only has high yield, but also has good quality. Studying the development process of alfalfa will help scholars in this field grasp the future research direction. In this paper, the data of alfalfa field from 2009 to August 14, 2020 retrieved on Web of Science is taken as the research object. Firstly, this paper analyses the current research status by using basic statistical methods. The selected analysis dimensions include time, country, funding source etc. Then, we conduct topic clustering research based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model and the scientometrics method to compare and analyze its interests from both the overall and time perspectives. Finally, the experimental results are presented in diagrams. The results reveal that the development of alfalfa field tends to be stable. China and the United States have made remarkable achievements in the field of alfalfa. The topics integration and decomposition trend is weak, and the research content has strong coherence.