Regenerative Agriculture Key Traits - Bibliometric Analysis and Quantitative Review

Abstract

Regenerative agriculture (RA) is an emerging topic that seeks to address the social and economic needs of farmers and their communities while pledging to provide a means of coping with climate change by restoring landscapes. The current study aims to paint a picture of the state of knowledge at this point because the topic keeps sparking academics' interest and the literature grows more extensive. The paper aims to find and present the characteristics of RA and to portray a common understanding of it by combing both quantitative (bibliometric analysis) to be able to include all papers that are mentioning RA and qualitative review (systematic literature reviews) to analyze and extract trends and ideas from the papers focused entirely on RA. The search was conducted in Scopus database and results show that the first paper mentioning RA was published in 1979. A total number of 530 papers were found for the period of 1979-2022 and they were processed using VOSviewer software resulting six clusters. Next, using several exclusion criteria 15 papers were selected for the systematic review. Finally, since there isn't a commonly accepted definition of RA, the study collected the key traits that were mentioned in the literature to paint an outline of it. The main key trait was healthy soil, and it was consistently emphasized when addressing this kind of agriculture.