A Scientometric Analysis of Research on Mealybugs and Its Control Measures

A scientometric search was performed using the keyword “Mealybugs”. There are 1,898 documents related to mealybug research published between 1996 and 2022 in the Web of Science database. The first research question of this study concerns the authors of the most published papers in the field of mealybug research and their H-index generated using Histcite software. Daane, K.M. from the University of California, USA published 50 papers in the area of mealybug with highest H-index of 23, followed by Kaydan, M.B. with 40 papers and Miller, J.G. with 29 papers. The second research question was to identify the most cited authors and journals. Therefore, citation metrics were used and found the following authors: Daane,K.M., Baumann P, Gullan P.J. are among the top 20 authors in the field mealybug research. Additionally, the most cited journals are the Journal of Economic Entomology, Zootaxa and Florida Entomologist. Regarding the third research question, which addressed the most publishing countries on mealybugs, USA places first with highest publishing (531 records) followed by China (178 records). India places third with 152 records. Mealybug is an invasive alien species. Among mealybugs, the papaya mealybug, (Paracoccus marginatus) is recorded from the Oriental Region for the first time, where it was found in Indonesia (Java) and India (Tamil Nadu) in 2008 India (Muniappan et al., 2008). After that only mealybug research is growing up in India. Mealybugs are native to Central America, it spreads to the Caribbean region and South America in the 1990s; since then, it has been accidentally introduced to some islands in the Pacific region. Hence, a vast study on mealybug was reported from the country USA. Finally, this study addressed the most publishing institutions, various funding agencies of mealybug researches, conferences held in mealybug research, Research areas, Languages of publication and the document types. Bibliographic coupling of authors, Organization and countries are constructed using VOSviewer software. From that cluster form of results, we can able to visualize the networks of authors, organization from different countries work on mealybug research.