Abstract:

The paper aims to hackle the research progress on the price of domestic watermelon industry, expound its history and present situation, to provide direction for further research. We analyzed the publishing time and journal distribution, research themes and subjects of 256 papers by bibliometric and content analysis, and found that there are three research stages of the watermelon price in China. The first is the guidance for industry (1982-2003), focusing on industry guidance and price control policy research; then is the industry guidance combined with academic research (2004-2007), industry guidance literature reached its peak, fundamental research began to appear; and the last one is the thorough theoretical analysis (2008-2018), mainly fundamental research. The evolution of those stages shows the nature of inheritance and innovation. In the end, we discuss the prospect of the watermelon price research from the aspects of price prediction, risk and uncertainty, the development of refined and deep processing of watermelon and the establishment of price indexes.

Key words: watermelon, price, stage characteristics, bibliometric, document retrieval