Data source
All publication figures come from OpenAlex, an open index of scholarly works, authors, institutions and topics, released under a CC0 license (Priem, Piwowar & Orr, 2022, arXiv:2205.01833). Data was last refreshed on 2026-09-29.
Fields and topics
OpenAlex assigns each paper a primary topic, one of about 4,500 automatically generated topic clusters. agri.science groups 182 of these topics into thirteen fields that follow how agricultural science is usually taught and organized. Each topic belongs to exactly one field, so field totals don't overlap.
Excluded on purpose: broad catch-all clusters that can't be attributed to a discipline, one oversized cluster (about 2.5 million papers) that would dominate every count, pure taxonomy and botany clusters, and companion-animal veterinary topics. Because topics are assigned by an algorithm, individual papers can be misclassified; the figures are reliable for comparing broad patterns, less so for fine distinctions.
Time windows
- Research output (universities, countries): papers published 2021–2025.
- Growth: papers 2024–2025 compared with 2021–2022. Two-year windows smooth out single-year noise. A topic needs at least 500 papers in the recent window to appear as a research front.
- The current year is left out because OpenAlex is still indexing it, which would always look like a drop.
Universities
A paper counts for a university when at least one author lists it, or one of its sub-units, as an affiliation. Papers with authors from several universities count for each of them. The directory lists the 100 universities with the largest output in the site's topic set. University systems that only aggregate their campuses are left out so campuses aren't counted twice. On field pages, national umbrella bodies such as ministries are hidden when a more specific research organization under them is listed.
Output is not quality
These figures measure how much a university or country publishes, not how good its research or teaching is. Large institutions and countries with large research systems will always rank high, which is why the site shows no composite ranking. For editorial rankings with their own methodologies, see the QS subject ranking for Agriculture & Forestry or ShanghaiRanking's Global Ranking of Academic Subjects.
Study programs
Study programs are compiled by hand from the universities' official websites, and each one links to the program page it comes from. Admission requirements, tuition and application deadlines change often and are therefore not copied here.
Highly cited papers
The paper lists show the most-cited articles and reviews from the last two complete years. Citation counts favor reviews and papers published early in the window, and they measure attention, not correctness.