Text mining the food security literature reveals substantial spatial bias and thematic broadening over time

Matthew W Cooper,Molly E Brown,Meredith T Niles,Moataz M Elqadi

doi:10.1016/j.gfs.2020.100392

Abstract

We conducted text mining analyses on nearly the entirety of academic literature related to food security. Assessing the literature's spatial scope, we found a truly global body of research conducted across 187 different countries, but with significant spatial heterogeneities in where research is conducted. Comparing the spatial distribution of the literature to actual rates of food insecurity, we found only a slight association between where food security research is conducted and where food security needs are located. Using topic modeling to assess the thematic scope of the literature, we found that originally food security research focused on economic policy and global issues, and only later did the literature expand to encompass themes like livelihoods, health, and the environment. This analysis provides the first ever thematic scoping of the entire food security literature and the first assessment of spatial biases in where food security research is conducted.

Highlights

The literature related to food security is necessarily broad
We found that 60.3% of the abstracts in the corpus had the majority of their toponyms from one country, with 187 different countries having been the focus of a study related to food security
Given the breadth and proliferation of the food security literature in recent years, using computational methods can provide a novel overview of the literature

Summary

Introduction

The science of ensuring that “all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient safe and nutritious food” (FAO, 1996) is highly interdisciplinary and requires collaboration across fields as diverse as agriculture, land use, nutrition, economics, genetics, physiology, hydrology, sociology, public policy, and more. These disciplines are all represented in the food security literature, attesting to a massive multi-decadal collaboration across almost the entirety of academia to study how we meet the basic human need for food. We used text-mining approaches to survey the geographic and thematic scope of the entire food security literature

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion