Global trends and bibliometric analysis of medicinal and aromatic plants in landscape research

Medicinal and aromatic plants constitute one of the most important components of both natural and cultural landscapes due to their aesthetic, ecological, cultural, and health-related attributes, and they have historically fulfilled multifunctional roles in landscape design and land-use practices. Today, the growing interest in these plants has given rise to an interdisciplinary research field at the intersection of health, economy, biodiversity, and sustainability, making a holistic evaluation of the development of this literature and its thematic orientations within the landscape context increasingly important. In this study, the scientific literature addressing medicinal and aromatic plants in the context of landscape design, planning, and management was examined using bibliometric methods, focusing on its development, structural characteristics, and thematic evolution during the period 2005–2024. The research aimed to evaluate the fragmented structure of the literature within an integrated framework by revealing the temporal, spatial, institutional, thematic, and citation-based patterns of publications located at the intersection of the concepts "medicinal/aromatic plants" and "landscape." For this purpose, the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection was used as the data source. The data were analyzed through a bibliometric workflow in the R program (version 4.3.2), including descriptive statistics, citation indicators, core source analysis based on Bradford's Law, Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS), co-authorship networks, keyword co-occurrence networks, and thematic trend analyses. The results indicated that publication output in this research field was limited and fluctuating during the period 2005–2008, gained relative stability between 2009 and 2014, and grew rapidly after 2015, accelerating notably from 2018 onward. Annual average citation rates did not exhibit a linear increase; instead, periodic fluctuations were particularly pronounced in years with a limited number of publications. RPYS analysis revealed that the reference base predominantly relies on post-1990s literature, suggesting that the field's knowledge infrastructure has been shaped largely by modern ethnobotanical, plant conservation, and socio-ecological approaches. At the country level, publication and citation volumes were concentrated in specific centers while institutional and author analyses showed that the field has developed around several key actors, with limited dominance of a single "super-actor." At the journal level, core publication channels displayed a Bradford-type scattering pattern, and a partial divergence between the production base and the local citation base was observed. Thematic analyses demonstrated that clusters such as "conservation," "biodiversity," "ethnobotany," "knowledge," and "landscape" were concentrated around the core theme of "medicinal plants," while the visibility of ecosystem services, climate change, and specific pharmacological or laboratory-oriented subthemes increased over time. The limitations of this study include the exclusive focus on English-language research and review articles indexed in the WoS database, the exclusion of Early Access records, and residual variations in author, institution, and keyword standardization. Despite these limitations, this research systematically maps the quantitative growth, core sources, and thematic transformation of the medicinal and aromatic plant–landscape literature, providing an important foundation for identifying research gaps and informing future landscape planning and management practices.