Co-author and co-cited reference network analysis for chlorophyll fluorescence research from 1991 to 2018

Chlorophyll a fluorescence has been extensively used in studying photosynthesis and overall physiology of plants, algae, and cyanobacteria. As a research hotspot, a large number of papers have been published. This creates a challenge for beginning researchers to gain a holistic view of co-author and co-cited reference network by reading individual publications. Further, these scientists need to understand the research trends in the field. Scientometric analysis, a method for mining publication datasets, was therefore conducted to analyze the co-author and co-cited reference network in the area of chlorophyll fluorescence research. The countries with high-citation-per-paper publications were used as filters to identify the active author communities. The representative author groupings in these representative countries were analyzed by the network-based methods. As authors may have different active periods, their groupings are categorized to analyze their focus areas. Finally, the timeline of knowledge distribution is presented through the use of co-cited reference networks. Although our current analysis was confined to 'plant sciences', several interesting conclusions, including some caveats, are drawn in our paper to provide an overall landscape on co-author and co-cited reference network of this field.