Deciphering the Landscape of Food Science Research Footprints: Scientific Specialties and SDGs

Abstract

Due to prevailing milieus, combating hunger, malnutrition, and improving functioning of food systems are now of greater priority to national and international policymakers than they were when the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) were announced in 2015. The trade-offs between sustainability, food security, food safety, and making better use of food already produced need to be addressed in the right perspective, using a hierarchy of strategies. One of the strategies could be to analyse research output to divulge the momentum research topics in the domain. This article explores core research specialties using the SCOPUS data due to its comprehensive coverage of the research output in food science from India during 2011–2020. The major outcomes reveal that: (a) research specialties of top topic clusters fall in the worldwide momentum areas and primary focus of Indian researchers lies in finding solutions to the aspects of security, safety, sustainability of food, and addressing the crucial aspects of malnutrition, involving an array of topics ranging from application of processes to enhancement of health benefits of plant food for human consumption; (b) prominence indicator signals that the top worldwide momentum areas have potency to attract more funding; (c) co-relation between prominent topic clusters, research topics of top contributing author’s, institutions and in highly cited papers vis a vis SDG’s elucidates that the research topics addressed by researchers, in general, are kindred topic areas, hence of core research importance. The study presents a discussion of the outcomes leading to evidence-based inferences, with enduring impact and value-addition to domain knowledge that can aid several stakeholders.