Consumo de miel: análisis bibliométrico y revisión sistemática

Abstract

Honey is the most widespread bee product in the world. Consumption-centered research supports the honey market, subsidizing marketing strategies focused on consumer’s profile. The present manuscript was aimed at providing a bibliometric analysis and a systematic review of scientific production on honey consumption. The data comprise periodical articles indexed in the Web of Science - Clarivate Analytics, processed in the VOSviewer software. A total of 472 articles with the radicals honey* consum* in the bibliometric analysis were identified. The manuscripts come from 68 countries, published between 1958 and 2018, with the largest number of publications in 2016 (52). Of the 472 articles initially retrieved, the reading of titles and abstracts revealed 22 specific papers about honey consumption. These articles comprise 14 countries. Their objectives included: to characterize the profile of the consumers, reasons that lead to the purchase and consumption of honey, perceptions about the market price, socioeconomic effects on the consumption pattern, among other aspects. However, the low number of articles identified in the systematic review reveals a gap still present in the literature on honey consumption. Despite the large number of articles originally identified at WoS database, the systematic revision revealed out the scarcity of publications directly dealing with honey consumption in their objectives, the number of which has been increasing from 2006 onwards. The results also showed that most research on honey consumption were based on quantitative methods, especially the use of face-to-face interview for data collection, which reveals a potential for further studies focused on these approaches. Poland and the United States stood out with the major countries with articles on honey consumption, although the lack of such studies for countries with large honey production (such as China, Iran and Turkey). Finally, regarding to the country of origin of the authors, a low internationalization of scientific literature on this research issue was also observed.