Urban Agriculture Research and Scholarship Trends

Abstract

<p>This project explores the peer-reviewed literature on urban agriculture (UA) research and associated scholarly publishing trends. UA research spans disciplines such as: agriculture, urban planning, government, health sciences, environmental sciences, water resources, economics, and conservation. In this study, seven databases were searched for peer-reviewed literature on UA. This poster explores UA research output by measuring the growth rate of peer reviewed research on UA (~18% from 1980-2015) and comparing to the growth of modern science (8-9%). Forty-one journal titles published greater than 5 articles on UA, showing how diverse the topic is. From this an analysis of related subjects was also done; the top 3 resulting subjects within UA research were: <em>Agriculture</em>, <em>Environmental Studies</em>, and <em>Housing and Urban Planning</em>. This research also includes a geographic analysis of field sites for UA publications. Of the top 20 countries where research was done on UA, studies conducted within the United States published 86 articles, and on the lower end of the top 20 countries was Japan, wherein 7 studies on UA had been published. In addition, a keyword analysis suggests that the type of UA research (community oriented versus environmental or agriculturally oriented) may be correlated with the GDP-PPP of the country in question. This poster will be valuable to librarians in collection development (public as well as academic), as well as liaison or subject librarians that work with researchers.</p>