TWO DECADES OF GIS-MCDA IN AGRICULTURAL LAND SUITABILITY ASSESSMENT: A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS AND SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

Abstract

This review examines two decades of Geographic Information System–Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (GIS MCDA) research in agricultural land suitability assessment by integrating bibliometric science mapping with a systematic thematic synthesis. The supplied Scopus screening workflow identified 740 records; 80 duplicate records were removed, leaving 660 records for screening. Of these, 246 records were excluded during screening, 246 full-text articles were assessed for eligibility, 114 were excluded after full-text assessment, and 132 studies were included in the qualitative synthesis. Keyword co-occurrence outputs place GIS, land suitability, analytical hierarchy process (AHP), multicriteria analysis, decision making, land use, and spatial analysis at the centre of the research field. The country collaboration outputs show an international network involving India, China, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Ethiopia, Japan, Australia, and Iran, with India represented by the largest visible country node in the supplied map. The thematic map places geographic information system–land use sustainable development and agricultural land–AHP–crop production in the motor-theme quadrant, while multicriteria analysis–decision making–spatial analysis appears as a basic theme. The overlay visualization indicates a temporal shift toward terms such as decision analysis, site selection, climate change, irrigation, watersheds, and related applied applications within the 2020–2023 scale shown in the VOSviewer output. The conceptual structure map obtained through multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) reports 43.08% inertia on Dimension 1 and 14.41% on Dimension 2, together accounting for 57.49% of the displayed two-dimensional structure. Together, these results show a field that is strongly centred on GIS-based suitability modelling and AHP/MCDA workflows while increasingly connecting them to land management, water-related applications, sustainability, and climate-related decision problems.