Horizon-scanning the ostrich industry with bibliometric indicators

Predictive modelling of publication activity is a new concept in agricultural analysis. This study illustrates the potential for identifying and quantifying patterns from the past 42 years of ostrich husbandry research. Studies on ostriches have been influenced considerably by production challenges, opportunities and threats, and owing to the large size of and variations in data and the monopolistic nature of the ostrich industry, there has been limited progress in classifying these research-front trends. Identifying these fronts will facilitate understanding of likely future developments and enable forecasting and the appropriate allocation of resources. This paper presents one of the first exploratory studies to capture and visualise temporal changes in ostrich research activity in the Google Scholar database. The results suggest that there are associations between the deregulation of the industry and increased emerging ostrich research, between the time of political isolation of South Africa and substantially increased global research on ostrich reproduction by 1996, and between epidemiological research and the outbreak of the avian influenza virus between 2004 and 2006. This indicative study contributes to the development of a novel prototype for the prediction of future developments and trends in agricultural research.