Trends in cultured meat

Abstract

The cellular agriculture is been considered as a mechanism to minimize future negative impacts from the estimated world population growth for the coming decades. Among the alternatives of this technology, the development of meat grown in the laboratory stands out. Numerous researchers have been making efforts to develop this scientific field today. However, few studies have tried to map the intellectual panorama and emerging themes in the scientific literature of this scientific field. Thus, this research aims to analyze from the perspective of the bibliometric and sociometric analysis the scientific publications on meat cultivated within the perspective of cellular agriculture, indexed in the Web of Science database. We analyzed 91 publications on cultured meat, combining mapping data, patterns of co-citation and collaboration from scientific journals and authorship. We also analyze emerging issues in the research on meat cultivated. We noted that, given the participation of authors and co-authors from different areas of knowledge, there is not a pattern in the composition of collaboration networks. Also stands out the multidisciplinary nature of the studies on cultured meat, transposing different disciplines and analytical approaches. Those aspects concerning the environmental, cultural impact, technical viability of its productive process and impacts on traditional livestock production appear as latent constructs in this new food biotechnology.

Analysis of Scientific and Press Articles Related to Cultured Meat for a Better Understanding of Its Perception

“…Among others, we considered different sets of elements that characterize the scientific or the press publications, such as year, scientific fields, journal, and authors, etc., to analyze data collected from WoS and/or Factiva. The obtained results were analyzed by means of univariate statistics (absolute and relative frequency) and compared with what was postulated by the Laws of Bibliometrics, namely, Lotka's Law, Bradford's Law, and Zipf 's Law based on authors' production on the studied topic, journal coverage of the topic, or occurrence of keywords related to the subject, respectively (Fernandes et al, 2019;Zhao et al, 2019). This allowed to identify patterns and to trace possible biases for this subject in the academic field or in mainstream media.…”

“…Using academic databases to conduct research on specialized topics has become the normative mode of scholarly investigation (Fernandes et al, 2019). Electronic databases that gather scientific publications provide a mechanism for rapid access to broad information, eliminating the need to manually search through paper copies of various publication types (Driedger and Weimer, 2015).…”

“…Indeed, the academic impact of any research (or of a specific article) can be assessed by the number of citations by other authors in the specific field (Iftikhar et al, 2019). However, other analyses can be conducted using the available research filters by year or country of publication or using keywords for example (Fernandes et al, 2019). For articles from the written press, similar analyses can be conducted as well (Goodwin and Shoulders, 2013;Hopkins, 2015).…”

The Myth of Cultured Meat: A Review

“…In this way, different names which have an influence on consumer attitude were proposed for cultured meat (55,56). Indeed, "in vitro meat, " "clean meat, " "cultured meat, " "labgrown meat, " "synthetic meat" and other names (15) suggest that this innovation is slaughter-free, more responsible toward our environment and a credible alternative to the current intensive farming systems.…”

“…Among the solutions, cultured meat is presented by its advocates as a sustainable alternative for consumers who want to be more responsible but do not wish to change the composition of their diet (10)(11)(12)(13). The history of cultured meat was detailed by Hamdan et al (14), and a bibliometric analysis of publications about this subject was carried out by Fernandes et al (15). Indeed, since the first publication about cultured meat in 2008, the number of publications increased considerably (89% of the total) after 2013.…”