Oli essenziali e loro applicazione in agricoltura: un’analisi della letteratura attraverso VOSviewer

The new guidelines of the European Commission intend to reduce the use of pesticides by 50%. A valid sustainable alternative to chemicals products in agriculture seems to be essential oils (EOs). The role of OEs is to cope external stressors for protecting plants themselves from pests and/or insects, bacteria, fungi and nematodes. The purpose of the work is to investigate which EOs have been evaluated in agriculture in the last 100 years, specially focusing on main target activities (antibacterial, insecticidal, fungicidal, acaricidal, antiviral, nematocidal). The examination has been done with VOSviewer software, which through the cluster analysis of scientific literature available on Scopus allows the visualization of network maps for keywords, countries, authors and journals.It was found that the highest number of EOs are associated with antibacterial and insecticidal activities, while few studies have been conduced for nematicidal activity. The majority of works on the topic have been done in Brazil, Italy and India taking into account target species as Meloidogyne and Bursaphelenchus, even if a specific EO has not been found yet to be efficace on nematodes. EOs are considered effective control methods in vitro, but more evidence are necessary in vivo. Accordingly, notwithstanding the promising results so far obtained, competing with synthetic products implicate investing more efforts in the assessment of the real protective action of EOs in crops as well as their cost-effectiveness.