The Research, Development, Commercialization, and Adoption of Drought and Stress-Tolerant Crops - Crop Improvement Under Adverse Conditions - page 20

Table 1.1 Top 20 journals by number of research articles on plant stress topics. (Data source: Web
of Science, Th omson Innovation 2011)
Rank Journal name Articles

1 Plant Physiology 903

2 Plant Molecular Biology 517

3 Journal of Experimental Botany 462

4 Plant Journal 458

5 Plant Science 389

6 Planta 362

7 Journal of Plant Physiology 336

8 Physiologia Plantarum 333

9 Plant and Cell Physiology 304

10 Plant Cell and Environment 300

11 Plant Cell 248

12 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 193

13 Plant Physiology and Biochemistry 190

14 Theoretical and Applied Genetics 176

15 Plant Cell Reports 176

16 Journal of Biological Chemistry 152

17 Crop Science 143

18 Euphytica 109

19 New Phytologist 106

20 Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications 105

tained, under the assumptions that they are more likely to represent discrete novel
contributions to the field, to conform to certain norms and standards, and to meet a
certain threshold of research significance. A total of 13,583 research articles pub-
lished from 1991 to 2010 were found.
Preliminary assessment of the publications dataset confirms that the majority
consists of technical plant genetics and physiology articles, but a minority cov-
ers more general articles on the biology of stress response across organisms (but
presumably by including plants in the discussion or references, given the search
strings used). The journals most frequently represented are the leading journals in
plant biology (listed in Table 1.1 ), but do include a couple of more general science
journals. Together, these 20 journals account for 44 % of the articles in the dataset.
Diagnostic queries within the publications dataset illustrate the relative frequen-
cies and interrelationships of research on different types of plant stress (Table 1.2 ).
These indicate that temperature and water stress are the most frequently addressed
topics and that they co-occur in 1833 out of the 8538 (or 21 % of the) articles that
include either or both sets of topics. The greatest degree of co-occurrence between
topics, however, is between water stress and salinity stress (33 %). The more gener-
al terms of abiotic stress occur less frequently in the literature, but overlap relative-
ly equally with all others. Thus, the literature appears to be fairly self-specialized
within each major type of stress, with some degree of overlap between stresses, as
should be expected (Mittler 2006 ).