Vertical Farming as Remedy to Boost Food Security: A Bibliometric Viewpoint

Abstract

The current study presents bibliometric investigations on research findings on vertical farming as related to food security from 1992-2023. The results obtained from findings includes key authors, leading nations in the number of citations and publications, leading affiliations, relevant journal outlets and trending topics among authors in the research domain. An aggregate of 484 research documents were gotten from the Web of Science (WoS) database with an average citations per doc and co-authors per document ratio of 25.3 and 4.11, respectively. Publications on vertical farming research was correlated in line the number of years (R² = 0.5196; y = 2.0264x – 4052.9) which is indicative of more increase in the number of articles as the years grows. The USA was the leading nation in terms of article numbers (N = 60) and citations (N = 2120). While China was second (N = 42) in number of publications, but sixth (N = 636) in terms of citations. The nations of USA (N = 19 ), China (N = 14) and Italy (N = 11) had multiply country collaborations (MCP) with other nations globally. Leading authors keywords trending topics include Vertical farming (N = 100), Hydroponic, Agriculture, Urban Agriculture, Sustainability, Farming among others. Economically stable as well as scientifically advanced nations had higher research outputs when compared to developing countries. The author keywords of the subject matters from the trending topics suggests the direction of future research for policy makers, governments and other stakeholders in promoting vertical farming in with food security and sustainability.