Environmental, Climatic, and Production Perspectives in Agroforestry Research: Reassessing the Position of Rural Livelihoods Through Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Agroforestry integrates environmental, climatic, productive, and socioeconomic dimensions. The position of rural livelihoods within its scientific structure remains still characterized. This study evaluated the temporal evolution, conceptual organization, domain representation, and geographical and economic distribution of global agroforestry research using 5711 Scopus-indexed journal articles published between 1979 and 2025. Scientific production increased markedly, with 4133 articles published during 2013 to 2025, accounting for 72.37% of the corpus. Thematic evolution showed a shift from early agronomic topics toward biodiversity, ecosystem services, carbon sequestration, and climate change. Multiple Correspondence Analysis of harmonized Author Keywords identified five clusters, with the first two dimensions explaining 39.76% of total inertia. Livelihood-related terms were embedded within the central agroforestry and sustainability cluster under the analytical configuration applied, and this pattern was maintained after excluding corpus-defining search-anchor terms. Production, silvopastoral, and agronomic management had the highest proportional contribution (57.92%), whereas environmental and biodiversity (43.88%), livelihoods and socioeconomic (43.81%), and climate, carbon and soil dimensions (42.50%) occurred at comparable proportions. Fractional affiliation analysis indicated that all domains occurred across regions and income groups, with livelihoods and socioeconomic research showing larger fractional contributions from Africa and lower-middle-income countries.