Mapping smart farming: Addressing agricultural challenges in data-driven era

Internet of Things (IoT) technology plays an important role in advancing the transformation of labor-intensive traditional agriculture into data-driven smart farming by providing technological and theoretical support to address the challenges of food shortages caused by rapid population growth, as well as the sustainable development challenges posed by the scarcity of natural resources due to climate warming. IoT smart farming is a multidisciplinary field encompassing agricultural knowledge, communication technologies, automation, artificial intelligence, and computing. The research in this domain has rapidly expanded and accumulated. Despite the availability of some review studies, their primary focal points pertain to assessing the architectures, devices, and communication technologies utilized in IoT smart farming, thus providing a thorough introduction to this research domain. This review employs scientific mapping to visualize the IoT smart farming research domain, exploring various research themes and their profiles, identifying highly cited and important research in the citation networks, and tracking the evolution of research interests. It offers a comprehensive overview of the field and proposes potential future work to address current research gaps, promoting interdisciplinary collaboration to support decision-makers in the agriculture sector.