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

Journal of Rural Studies. 2022. Vol. 92. P. 294–305.

Fomina Y., Glińska-Neweś A., Ignasiak-Szulc A.

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.

Keywords: food supply, bibliometric analysis, systematic literature review, sustainable development, Community Supported Agriculture