Effect of COVID-19 on agricultural production and food security: A scientometric analysis

Abstract Coronavirus disease has created an unexpected negative situation globally, impacting the agricultural sector, economy, human health, and food security. This study examined research on COVID-19 in relation to agricultural production and food security. Research articles published in Web of Science and Scopus were sourced, considering critical situations and circumstance posed by COVID-19 pandemic with regards to the shortage of agricultural production activities and threat to food security systems. In total, 174 published papers in BibTeX format were downloaded for further study. To assess the relevant documents, authors used “effects of COVID-19 on agricultural production and food security (ECAP-FS) as a search keyword for research published between 2016 and April 2021 utilising bibliometric innovative methods. The findings indicated an annual growth rate of about 56.64%, indicating that research on ECAP-FS increased over time within the study period. Nevertheless, the research output on ECAP-FS varied with 2020 accounting for 38.5%, followed by 2021 with 37.9% as at April 2021. The proposed four stage processes for merging two databases for bibliometric analyses clearly showed that one can run collaboration network analyses, authors coupling among other analyses by following our procedure and finally using net2VOSviewer, which is embedded in Rstudio software package. The study concluded that interruptions in agricultural food supply as a result of the pandemic impacted supply and demand shocks with negative impacts on all the four pillars of food security.