A bibliometric analysis of food studies: Evidence from British Food Journal

Abstract

The objective of the current study is to overview the British Food Journal publications from 2010 to 2020. To address our purpose, bibliometric and visualization analyses were used. Firstly, a total of 1892 documents published from 2010 to 2020 in the British Food Journal (BFJ) was obtained from the Web of Science database (WoS). Then, the analyses were made by running VOS viewer software. In the process of analyzing data, we have principally considered some bibliometric indicators such as the number of annual publications, the most productive organizations, the most cited papers, the most contributing countries, the most productive authors, the co-occurrence of author keywords, the co-authorship of countries, and the co-citation of authors. The results show that BFJ is one of the leading and prominent journals with the number of publications increasing each year according to the basic indicators mentioned above. Further to this, the most productive and contributing authors, institutions, and countries are mainly from European countries. The most common researched fields according to the co-occurrence of author keywords are listed as “consumer behavior, food safety, food products, food industry, food, nutrition, organic food, sustainability, and consumer”. BFJ is a pioneer, international and interdisciplinary journal in the context of ‘food’ and ‘tourism’ since 1899. Although it is highly respected worldwide, there has been no other research that analyzes the papers of BFJ by bibliometric approach. This article thus is the first extensive study to provide an overview of the BFJ's leading trends and researchers over the period 2010 and 2020. Therefore, the current study may help in objectively understanding the development of the BFJ and it may provide a valuable reference for scholars whose is studying food and tourism.