Community supported agriculture: Setting the research agenda through a bibliometric analysis: Fid-Bau Portal

Community supported agriculture: Setting the research agenda through a bibliometric analysis

Fomina, Yulia / Glińska-Neweś, Aldona / Ignasiak-Szulc, Aranka

Abstract Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) plays a significant role in improving consumers' access to fresh and high-quality fruits and vegetables, often at lower prices than in grocery stores. Correspondingly, consumers’ participation in CSAs is connected with their knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs regarding healthy eating. Being of such social significance, research on CSA can attract the attention of scholars from a variety of fields, including human nutrition, sustainable development and consumer behaviors. This paper aims to map the research front of Community Supported Agriculture in order to identify the main themes and further research directions. The study examines 242 scientific articles on CSA over the last three decades by conducting bibliometric analyses via VOSviewer software, including on the co-occurrence of keywords and bibliometric coupling of documents, and it combines the latter with a systematic literature review. The study contributes to the development of research on CSA by identifying leading thematic clusters in the field. The analyses suggest that the most promising directions of research on CSA focus on consumers, their nutrition and health, as well as on social change led by CSA. These findings suggest that addressing societal and environmental problems serves as a particularly promising and contemporarily significant ground for CSA research by scholars of different disciplines.

Highlights • The study examines 242 scientific articles on Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). • The analysis identified two main directions of research on CSA: “the Institution of CSA” and “the Human and Nutrition in CSA”. • Bibliometric coupling of documents identified seven specific thematic clusters. • The findings suggest that addressing sustainable development serves as particularly promising ground for studying CSA.