A bibliometric assessment of urban agriculture indexed in Scopus and Wos from 1978-2023

Abstract

Urban agriculture is a system of food production in and around urban settlements aimed at ameliorating the challenge of food shortage. The goal of this study is to explore emergent worldwide publication trends, contemporary focus and gaps in urban agriculture research over the last four decades (1978-2023). Despite the numerous research work on urban agriculture, gap existed in literatures on a research to qualitatively quantify the collective global outputs of studies done on urban agriculture. A Bibliometric approach was employed to analyse the research publications extracted from the combination of WoS and Scopus data banks. A total of 3817 articles were recovered from these two databanks with an average citations per doc and co-authors per document ratio of 18.34 and 3.29, respectively. Studies on urban agriculture researches were positively correlated with the number of years (R2 = 0.6507; y = 7.5651x - 95.562) suggesting a rise in the number of publications on the subject matter. The USA was ranked in the top position in terms of outputs and citation numbers (n = 605; 15612), followed by China (n = 284; 4648) and Germany (n = 181; 4786). The study indicated that urban agriculture is increasingly attracting global attention with an impressive rise in research publications from 2002 to 2023. The investigation on urban agriculture is mostly carried out in financially stable economies with minimal representations from developing nations and institutions. Some main emphasis and hotspot within the field of urban agriculture research is tailored towards food security, urban farming, urban gardening, sustainability, community gardening and climate change with minimal work on research in the aspects of policy and governance, thus signifying the direction for future investigations.