IAALD AFITA WCCA2008 WORLD CONFERENCE ON AGRICULTURAL INFORMATION AND IT Bibliographic Analysis of Japanese Rice Research

The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) has published the Rice Bibliography (RB) since 1963. IRRI had the Japan Library Office, which compiled the 1990-2000 Bibliography of Japanese Rice Research (BJRR) with the aims to provide more efficient information retrieval and bibliometrics in a specific-subject bibliographic database. We investigated the characteristics of Japanese rice research using bibliometric indicators based on the classifications of research subjects, organizational affiliation and literature source’s publishers as well as the descriptors assigned to about 20,000 bibliographic records of the 1990-2000 BJRR. The main bibliographic results are as follows. i) The Japanese rice literature accounts for about one fifth of the world rice literature (RB). ii) Rice research covers many fields classified into 7 categories (general, botanical research, growth environment, cultural technology, plant protection, food processing, socioeconomic aspects, and environmental conservation) and into 75 subcategories. iii) A large number of articles are distributed in small amount of core journals whereas a smaller number of articles in larger number of other journals following the Bradford’ s law. iv) Co-occurrence of specific descriptors assigned frequently appeared among different disciplines. v) There were about 1,800 organizations engaged in rice research as affiliation, mainly national & local government research institutes,universities, and companies with priority given to specific research subjects. MAFF (Min. Agric. For. & Fish.) placed emphasis on subjects related to food security including crop disasters, infrastructure as well as basic sciences. Strong collaboration was seen between national and local government institutes or universities, and companies and universities in co-authors. The results suggest that rice research is interdisciplinarity science to achieve higher rice yield or sustainable farming.