Local food research: a bibliometric review using Citespace II (1970–2020)

Abstract

PurposeIn recent years, one of the most important and active research areas has been local food. This study aims to examine the evolution and trends of local food research in several disciplines or fields in the 50 years, highlighting emerging research themes, collaborations such as authors, institutions, journals and co-citations such as documents, authors and journals.Design/methodology/approachA total of 869 local food-related articles from the Web of Science (WoS) database from 1970 to 2020 were analyzed by several bibliometric analyses using CiteSpace II software.FindingsThe findings indicate that the number of studies in the local food field has increased rapidly and it is an interdisciplinary subject. Moreover, the results indicate that there is partly collaboration among authors, institutions or countries that conduct research on local food. For example, the most productive authors in this field are in USA, India, Brazil and European countries. Another remarkable result of this study is that tourism and hospitality discipline has focused on local food subject, especially in the last five years.Originality/valueThis is one of the first attempts by using network analysis to directly understand and visualize the interrelated structures of the local food research. Furthermore, the results of this study may provide researchers a reference guide to better evaluate and monitor local food research.

Editorial: Special selection on bibliometrics and literature review

“…The last paper, Şahin and Yılmaz (2022), studied the evolution and trends of local food research using the WoS database from 1970 to 2020 using CiteSpace II software. They highlighted emerging research themes; collaborations such as authors, institutions, journals and co-citations such as documents, authors and journals.…”

Evaluation of sustainable development and travel agencies within the scope of Agenda 2030: A bibliometric analysis

“…How thick the linkages are denoting the extent of author cooperation, while the size of the nodes represents the total number of publications by a particular author. The multidisciplinary nature of the field is obvious when an author's cooperation network includes a significant participant count and a diverse variety of cooperation (Fang et al, 2018;Liu et al, 2019;Sahin and Yilmaz, 2021).…”

“…In order to determine the evolution of a study topic, author co-citation analysis establishes and proves which publications have been cited by the same papers. This method may be used to find out not just distribution of authors who are frequently mentioned, but also the impact of researchers on a particular topic (Yu et al, 2019;Sahin and Yilmaz, 2021). Author co-citation analysis, on the other hand, gathers all of an author's publications into a single document, with just the first author taken into account (Fang et al, 2018).…”

Education Quality and Tourism Faculty: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…Collaboration between academics on a certain issue is crucial for the growth and improvement of research fields (Li et al, 2017;Şahin & Yılmaz, 2021). Author collaboration analysis exposes the relationships between significant writers as well as the significance of the authors (Zhang et al, 2020).…”

“…The size of the nodes represents the number of articles written by a specific author, and the thickness of the linkages represents the level of author collaboration (Liu et al, 2019). The multidisciplinary nature of the field is demonstrated by an author cooperation network with a significant number of members and a diverse range of partnerships (Fang et al, 2018;Şahin & Yılmaz, 2021).…”