Mapping global agricultural research trends and their implications for farmer productivity and sustainable livelihoods

Over the past two decades, agricultural research has undergone a significant transformation, increasingly integrating sustainability, climate resilience, and technological innovation to address the complex challenges of global food production and rural livelihoods. This study mapped global agricultural research trends and examined their implications for farmer productivity and sustainable livelihoods. Using 128 filtered documents from Scopus (exported February 25, 2026), VOSviewer was applied to analyze co-authorship networks, keyword co-occurrence networks, and overlay. Findings indicated that global research had evolved from early studies emphasizing environmental sustainability, carbon management, land use, and climate resilience, toward more recent work focused on digital and smart agriculture technologies, including big data, internet of things (IoT), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), intelligent robotics, and agriculture 5.0. This evolution reflected the emergence of integrated thematic pillars encompassing sustainability, environmental management, technological innovation for smallholders, and crop production systems. The study also highlighted that strong interdisciplinary and cross-regional collaborations were instrumental in knowledge integration and the development of context-responsive strategies. The results demonstrated that contemporary agricultural research is increasingly combining productivity enhancement with ecological stewardship, providing evidence-based insights to support resilient farming practices, technological adoption, and sustainable livelihoods globally. The study provides strategic insights for guiding future research directions, strengthening innovation ecosystems, informing evidence-based policymaking, and fostering inclusive agricultural transformation across diverse socio-economic and geographic contexts.