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Mapping the research trends on blockchain technology in food and

agriculture industry: A bibliometric analysis

Naghmeh Niknejad, Waidah Ismail, Mahadi Bahari, Rimuljo Hendradi,

Ahmad Zaki Salleh

PII: S2352-1864(20)31572-8
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eti.2020.101272
Reference: ETI 101272

To appear in: Environmental Technology & Innovation

Received date : 6 June 2020

Revised date : 13 October 2020
Accepted date : 25 November 2020

Please cite this article as: N. Niknejad, W. Ismail, M. Bahari et al., Mapping the research trends on
blockchain technology in food and agriculture industry: A bibliometric analysis. Environmental
Technology & Innovation (2020), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eti.2020.101272.

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© 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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Mapping the Research Trends on Blockchain Technology in Food and

Agriculture Industry: A Bibliometric Analysis

Naghmeh Niknejad 1, Waidah Ismail 1, *, Mahadi Bahari 2, *, Rimuljo Hendradi 3, *, Ahmad Zaki Salleh 4

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1
Faculty of Science and Technology, Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia, Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia
2
Azman Hashim International Business School, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor, Malaysia
3
Information System Study Program, Universitas Airlangga, Mulyorejo, Surabaya, Indonesia
4

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Faculty of Syariah and Law, Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia, Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia
*
Corresponding authors: waidah@usim.edu.my; mahadi@utm.my; rimuljohendradi@fst.unair.ac.id

Abstract

Blockchain is an undeniably ingenious leading technology that has attracted the attention of
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academics and practitioners in different industries and disciplines. Due to the increasing

interest of academic scholars in agri-food supply chain, this research aims to examine

blockchain technology with a focus on the food and agriculture studies. Therefore, a
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bibliometric technique was adopted to detect the prominent trends and themes in this domain

through analysing the substantial articles, authors, countries, and keywords. This research

attempts to expand a graphical mapping of the bibliographic information of food and

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agriculture research using the R package bibliometrix and Visualisation of Similarities (VOS)

viewer application. Thus, the present research performed the following analyses: the co-

occurrence of author keywords, multiple correspondence analysis, bibliographic coupling

analysis, co-citation analysis, and network view map analysis. The findings of the network
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view map revealed that food and agriculture studies have been categorised into three clusters,

and the terms mostly used in the title and abstract of the articles were traceability, transaction,

Internet of Things (IoT), safety, and food supply chain.

Keywords: Food and Agriculture; R package bibliometrix; Scopus; VOSviewer; Blockchain

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1. Introduction

The world confronts tremendous challenges when it comes to providing food for such a

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growing population. The most important challenges include floods, drought, climate change,

desertification, loss of biodiversity, disease, and pests (Parizad et al., 2019). Innovation in food

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and agriculture processes is needed to cope with some of these challenges and, more

specifically, to make agriculture both exciting and profitable for all the stakeholders, especially

the smallholder farmers who are engaged in feeding the world (Sylvester, 2019).

One of the most prominent technological revolutions in the food and agriculture industry
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(FAI) is blockchain (Renda, 2019; Salah et al., 2019a). About a decade ago, an unidentified

person or group nicknamed Satoshi Nakamoto explained in a white paper how blockchain

technology could be used to encrypt bitcoin to solve the problem of maintaining transactions
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and avoiding the problem of double-spending (Nakamoto, 2008). Bitcoin uses blockchain to

enable reliable financial transactions without the need for a reliable central authority such as

banks and financial institutions (Kamilaris et al., 2019; Tschorsch and Scheuermann, 2016). A
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blockchain is a digital transaction ledger maintained by a network of multiple computing

machines that do not rely on a trusted third party. Individual transaction data files (blocks) are

managed through special software platforms that allow data to be transferred, processed, stored,

and readable by humans. Each block contains a header with a timestamp, transaction data, and

a link to the previous block. A hash is generated for each block based on its content and then
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referenced in the next block heading. Therefore, any manipulation in a particular block will

lead to a mismatch in the hash of all subsequent blocks (Kamilaris et al., 2019).

Blockchain is recognized as an efficient, robust, and cost-effective technology (using smart

contracts) to control interactions between multiple participants or devices in a secure, reliable,

efficient, and decentralized manner (Chaer et al., 2019; Nesarani et al., 2020). Thus, blockchain
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can be an important key technology to provide reliable, cost-effective, and decentralized

solutions, as well as to make other technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) (Khan and

Salah, 2018; Suliman et al., 2019), 5G (Chaer et al., 2019), artificial intelligence (AI) (Salah et

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al., 2019b), etc. more efficient.

Despite the other software development platforms, the use of blockchain enables all the

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stakeholders of a business network to share the same transaction data and business rules in their

nodes. Therefore, blockchain can minimise the information asymmetry and conflicts amongst

the business partners, hence improving governance (Lucena et al., 2018). Additionally,

blockchain technology could guarantee the integrity of data and prevent single point failure
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and tampering by suggesting immutability, fault-tolerance, transparency, traceability, and

trustfulness of the transaction records to all stakeholders (Zhao et al., 2019). Recently,

academics’ engagement in studying blockchain technology in the FAI domain has increased
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annually. Consequently, there is a need to analyse the associated publications through reliable

analytical techniques.

Over the last few years, analytical techniques have become increasingly popular due to their
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competency of data collection and the ability of Information Technology (IT) to deal with the

big data (Hazen et al., 2016; Tiwari et al., 2018). Analytical techniques refer to a broad range

of techniques that analyse various sorts of problems in a way to identify a solution by providing

precise predictions of the possible outcomes (Cancino et al., 2019).

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In library and information science (LIS), bibliometric is a research field that features

different techniques and methods to analyse quantitatively the bibliographic information of

articles. Generally, bibliometric techniques utilise IT to analyse and process both quantitative

and qualitative data using bibliographic information and prepare significant concepts

(Takahashi and Kajikawa, 2017). Different definitions for the bibliometric method are
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available throughout the literature. For instance, Pritchard (1969) and Broadus (1987)

characterised bibliometric as a research area of LIS, which examines the bibliographic

information through utilising quantitative methodologies (Gaviria-Marin et al., 2018).

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Although this method was first implemented over five decades ago (Ding et al., 2014), due to

the significant advances in IT (which have made the calculations easier), the popularity of this

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method has increased among academicians (Cancino et al., 2019). Thus, the present study seeks

to present the graphical mapping of the bibliometric information related to the food and

agriculture investigations by employing the R package bibliometrix and Visualisation of

Similarities (VOS) viewer application.

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The organisation of this paper is as follows. Section 2 provides a brief literature review of

Blockchain technology in FAI. Section 3 presents the methodology, including data collection

and search strategy. In Section 4, the data analysis and visualisation are presented. The
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discussion is explained in Section 5. Finally, the conclusions, limitations, and suggestions for

future research are provided in Section 6.

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2. Blockchain in Food and Agriculture Industry (FAI)

Similar to other sectors of the economy, the FAI and supply chain transactions have not yet

undergone a complete digital transformation in many developing countries (Parizad et al.,

2018; Tripoli and Schmidhuber, 2018). In a study, Tripoli and Schmidhuber, (2018) have
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identified the following as some of the current challenges the global agricultural industry is

facing: 1) Meeting the nutritional needs of a growing population, 2) Changing consumer

preferences in low- and middle-income countries from grain-based products to more animal,

fruit, and vegetable products, 3) Reduction in environmental footprint and promotion of more

sustainable agricultural practices in the environment, 4) Reduction in supply chain costs, 5)

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Maintaining high-quality sanitary and phytosanitary standards, 6) Maintaining profitable

agricultural operations, and 7) Increase in the income of small farmers.

Global agricultural trade flow is estimated at approximately $1.7 trillion annually, a

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threefold increase over the past decade (FAO, 2017). At the same time, wastage and loss of

perishable products are accompanied by global food scandals and the effects of economic and

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societal overflows highlight the uncertainty of existing food tracking systems, inefficiencies in

food quality monitoring, and fraudulent events in the whole process of supply chains from

supply to demand. To this end, blockchain creates a promising digital technology that enables

the food and agricultural supply chain to securely share information and avoid potential risks
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(Bechtsis et al., 2019).

The suitable performance and high capability of blockchain technology have been proven in

many cryptocurrencies and financial transactions to solve the problem of scenarios in which a
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large number of unreliable actors are involved in the resource distribution (Manski, 2017;

Sharma, 2017). Since 2014, it has been increasingly understood that blockchain technology can

be utilized in many other fields. One of the most notable fields is the FAI (Kamilaris et al.,
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2019). The FAI is amongst the industries that are based on several actors (multi-actor) and

many people are involved in this industry from the time of production to distribution, such as

farmers, transportation companies, wholesalers and retailers, distributors, and stores (Kamilaris

et al., 2019).
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The advantage of using blockchain over traditional methods is its ability to encrypt product

traceability in an end-to-end way and allowing the consumer to easily access this information

over the Internet (Galvez et al., 2018). When applied to the food and agricultural supply chain,

this technology enables the storage of a wide range of data. Any data that is considered

important can be added to the blockchain system by members of the business network, such as
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the location of the food product in real-time. Once all network members have approved the

entered data, they cannot be changed. In this way, it is possible to permanently record all data

related to that particular food product (Galvez et al., 2018). For example, the US retail

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company, Walmart, has implemented blockchain technology for the mango supply chain

(Yiannas, 2018). The time required to track the final crop to the farm was reduced from

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approximately 7 days using the traditional method to 2.2 seconds using blockchain technology

(Yiannas, 2018). Not only can blockchain maintain an unchanging copy of records, but it can

also make access to those records much more efficiently (Gopi et al., 2019).

3. Methodology
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This review used bibliometric analysis tools to examine the structure and substance of

blockchain technology in food and agriculture literature. To evaluate the effectiveness and
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performance of academic journals and individual scholars, bibliometric analysis can be applied

to journal citations, authors, or other metadata (Zhao and Strotmann, 2015). Citations can

represent connections among an individual author and a subject, topic, methodology, and the
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co-authors (Adams et al., 2016). According to Zhao and Strotmann (2015), scholars can use

citation analysis to i) map study areas to investigate their intellectual structures, ii) assess

academic implications and evaluate information sources, iii) trace the diffusion of ideas and

knowledge flows, iv) assist with information retrieval, organisation, and representation, and v)
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investigate the users and utilisation of academic literature.

3.1 Data Collection and Search Strategy

Since the Elsevier’s abstract and citation database, namely Scopus, has the most comprehensive

peer-reviewed investigations associated with the study topic, this platform was selected for the
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present study (Anglada-Tort and Sanfilippo, 2019; Luo et al., 2018). After several tests, the

following search string was performed for title, abstract, and keywords to identify studies

related to blockchain technology in FAI: ((blockchain OR "block chain" OR "blockchain")

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AND (agriculture OR agri OR agro OR food OR dairy OR fish)). Data were retrieved on

February 10, 2020. As a result, the articles published in 2020 were excluded from this study.

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According to Yadav and Singh (2019) and the results of the search string in this research, the

first paper of blockchain technology in FAI was published in 2016 (Feng Tian, 2016). By

limiting the documents to the conference papers, articles, and book chapters as well as

excluding Non-English papers, a total of 171 articles were retrieved. From the publications
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accessed, the visualisation and bibliometric mapping were performed through VOSviewer

software (van Eck and Waltman, 2010) and R package bibliometrix (Aria and Cuccurullo,

2017). In the present paper, to analyse the collected data through VOSviewer, a method similar

to the one suggested by Cancino et al. (2019) and Colares et al. (2020) was used. Furthermore,
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for the R package bibliometrix analysis, a method similar to the one recommended by Anglada-

Tort and Sanfilippo (2019) and Luo et al. (2018) was applied.
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4. Data analysis and visualisation

The Scopus dataset included 171 separate studies on the defined subject with a total number of

561 authors. With an overview of the dataset, the authors have applied 421 different keywords
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to categorise their studies. Furthermore, the average citations per papers were equal to 5.386.

This result indicates that there are few papers with a large number of citations, while numerous

papers exist with few citations. Moreover, the dataset included 16 single-authored studies on

blockchain in FAI, while 546 different researchers co-authored 155 articles. The mean number

of co-authors in each paper was 3.57, which indicates that blockchain articles in FAI tend to
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be the outcome of collaborative investigation attempts. Table 1 demonstrates the summarized

statistics of these data.

Table 1: Summary ofthe bibliographic statistics for blockchain technology in the food and agriculture domain

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Description Result
Articles 171
Period 2016 - 2019

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Author’s Keywords 421
Keywords Plus 1132
Sources (Books, Journals, etc.) 129
Author Appearances 610
Authors 561
Authors of multi-authored articles 546
Authors of single-authored articles 15
Single-authored articles 16

Authors per Article

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Average citations per articles 5.386
3.28
Articles per Author 0.305
Co-Authors per Articles 3.57
Collaboration Index 3.52
Types of Articles
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Conference Paper 106
Article 59
Book Chapter 6

Figure 1 shows the entire distribution of publications in blockchain technology in FAI

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from 2016 to 2019. As indicated by Yadav and Singh (2019), contemporary interests in the

concept of blockchain in FAI emerged in 2016 with publishing only one article. Then, 13

out of the 171 articles were released in 2017, 45 articles in 2018, and 112 articles in 2019.

The results revealed that the interest of scholars in this field is increasing annually.
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120

Number of Publications 100

80

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60

40

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20

0
2016 2017 2018 2019
Year

Figure 1: Annual scientific production of blockchain articles in FAI indexed in SCOPUS, 2016-2019
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Table 2 presents the evaluation of the citations with seven thresholds, which allows the

analysis of the quality of the published articles. The only published article in 2016 has the

highest number of citations (210). The year 2018 has the greatest number of citations (388)

with an average above 8 citations per article and 4 citations per year. Note that the year 2019
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had the most number of zero citations at the time of extracting data from the Scopus database.

These results reveal that research on blockchain technology in FAI has started recently and 43

percent of the publications have received citations.

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Table 2: Annual citation evolution of blockchain studies in FAI

Year TP TC ≥100 ≥50 ≥25 ≥10 ≥5 ≥1 0 Mean TC/P Mean TC/Y

2016 1 210 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 210 52.5
2017 13 216 0 1 3 6 7 11 2 16.61 5.54
2018 45 388 0 1 6 11 17 28 17 8.62 4.31
2019 112 107 0 0 0 0 9 33 79 0.95 0.95
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Total 171 921 1 3 10 18 34 73 98 - -

Percentage 100% - 1% 2% 6% 11% 20% 43% 57% - -

Figure 2 represents the productive countries identified by concerning the total publications

counted by the corresponding author’s country. Amongst 32 countries, India tops the list,

followed by China and the USA in publishing articles in blockchain technology in FAI.

Although agriculture is one of the most important parts of the economies in the developed
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countries (such as Japan and Norway), the analysis reveals that developing countries (such as

India, China, and Indonesia) have made more attempts to develop research into blockchain

technology in FAI.

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16

14

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Number of Publications

12

10

0
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Portugal
Greece

United Kingdom

Ecuador

South Africa
India
China
USA

Korea

Australia

France

Vietnam
Pakistan
Taiwan
Ukraine
Austria
Bangladesh

Japan
Luxembourg
Malaysia
New Zealand
Italy

Indonesia
Germany

Hong Kong
Spain

Norway

Sri Lanka
Turkey

Israel

Slovenia
Canada

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Country

Figure 2: The top publishing countries in the blockchain technology in FAI

This bibliometric study applied the citation analysis to investigating the connectivity degree
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between pairs of nodes (papers) in the 171-node network. Table 3 presents the top 10 papers

according to the number of local citations. The number of times an article has been cited

through other articles in the 171-node network is defined as the "local citation". In contrast, the

"global citation" refers to the total Scopus citations for the article. As presented in Table 3, a
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remarkable gap exists between the values of global citations and local citations, which shows

that blockchain technology in FAI has received attention from academic scholars in other fields

as well. Moreover, Table 3 reveals that the order of articles based on global citations does not

certainly match the order of local citations.

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Table 3: The top 10 most-cited papers

R Title of Paper Author(s) Year LC GC TC/Y

“An agri-food supply chain traceability system for China

1 Tian, F. 2016 20 210 42
based on RFID & blockchain technology”

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“A supply chain traceability system for food safety
2 Tian, F. 2017 14 91 22.75
based on HACCP, blockchain & Internet of things”
Caro, M. P., Ali, M. S.,
“Blockchain-based traceability in Agri-Food supply
3 Vecchio, M., Giaffreda, 2018 9 37 12.333
chain management: A practical implementation”

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R.
“Research on agricultural supply chain system with Leng, K., Bi, Y., Jing, L.,
4 double chain architecture based on blockchain Fu, H. C., Van 2018 8 41 13.667
technology” Nieuwenhuyse, I.
Casado-Vara, R., Prieto,
“How blockchain improves the supply chain: case study
5 J., De la Prieta, F., 2018 6 44 14.667
alimentary supply chain”
Corchado, J. M.
“Credit Evaluation System Based on Blockchain for Mao, D., Wang, F., Hao,
6 2018 4 15 5
Multiple Stakeholders in the Food Supply Chain” Z., Li, H.

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for Agricultural Products Tracking”
“ProductChain: Scalable Blockchain Framework to
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“Secured Data Storage Scheme Based on Block Chain
Xie, C., Sun, Y., Luo, H. 2017

Malik, S., Kanhere, S. S.,

3 13 3.25

8 2018 3 10 3.333
Support Provenance in Supply Chains” Jurdak, R.
“Innovative Blockchain-Based Approach for Sustainable
Mao, D., Hao, Z., Wang,
9 and Credible Environment in Food Trade: A Case Study 2018 3 6 2
F., Li, H.
in Shandong Province, China”
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“A Framework for Blockchain Based Secure Smart
10 Patil, A.S. 2018 3 10 3.333
Green House Farming”
R= Rank; LC= Local citations within the 171 articles; GC= Global citations; TC/Y= Total citations per year

Figure 3 displays the journals’ co-citation for blockchain in FAI. Generally, co-citation
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refers to a situation in which two distinct articles are cited through a similar third paper (Small,

1973). In other words, a citation from an article by two discrete articles from different journals

is referred to as journals’ co-citation. Therefore, IEEE Access, Food Control, Computing

Research Repository, International Journal of Information Management, and IEEE Internet of

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Things Journal are the journals that have received the highest co-citations.
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Figure 3: Co-citation of journals for blockchain in FAI

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Table 4 supports the results of Figure 3 by presenting the data of the top 10 most local-cited

journals from the reference lists. It is worth mentioning that the term ‘blockchain’ was emerged

by an anonymous group of individuals with the alias Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 through a white

paper entitled “Bitcoin: a Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System” (Nakamoto, 2008; Taylor et
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al., 2019). Since this article was not published in any conferences or academic journals, the

title of the article appears in Table 4 and the bibliographic visualisations.

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Table 4: The top 10 most local-cited journals from the reference lists

Rank Journal Name Articles

1 IEEE Access 62
2 Food Control 44
3 Bitcoin a Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System 40
4 Computing Research Repository 29
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5 IEEE Internet of Things Journal 25

6 International Journal of Information Management 23
7 Future Generation Computing Systems 22
8 Sustainability 19
9 Computer 16
10 Future Generation Computer Systems 16
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Figure 4 reports the co-citation of authors in the blockchain technology field in FAI. The

publication of Satoshi Nakamoto (2008) is the most cited article in the blockchain technology

in FAI, hence being one of the most cited authors in the blockchain field. The next most-cited

author is Feng Tian (2016, 2017). The distinct colours in Figure 4 represent the different

clusters and the linkages among them.

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Figure 4: Co-citation of authors for publications of blockchain technology in FAI

Figure 5 presents the bibliographic coupling of the articles and the visual indicator of
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clusters by colour. The nodes’ size in Figure 5 is proportionate to the total number of citations

of each article. Moreover, distance or proximity of the studies in the network signifies to what

degree the nodes/papers are bibliographically coupled. For example, the closeness of the two
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articles means that they share a considerable amount of their references (Marchiori and Franco,

2019). This analysis included only articles with a minimum of five citations. 28 connected

articles out of the 171 documents met the threshold. The total link strengths and the number of

citations were calculated for all the publications in the VOSviewer software, and the articles
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with the highest total link strength were chosen. As presented in Figure 5, the most cited

publication was Feng Tian (2016) with 210 citations and 4 total link strengths. However, the

strongest article was Kamble et al. (2019) with 8 citations and 31 total link strengths.
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Figure 5: Bibliographic coupling of documents

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Figure 6 graphically shows the bibliographic coupling of countries, in which each node

signifies a country, and its size indicates the number of publications in the corresponding

country. Similar to the findings of Figure 2, this figure also confirms that China, the USA,

India, and Italy are the leaders of developing research into the blockchain technology in FAI.
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Figure 6: Bibliographic coupling of countries

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Co-occurrence of the author’s keywords is the next analysis prepared by the VOSviewer

software, which was a way of comprehensively understanding the leading keywords for
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blockchain technology in FAI at the moment of conducting this study. As shown in

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Figure 7, blockchain, traceability, IoT, supply chain, smart contract, and food safety are the

leader keywords used most frequently. Figure 8 presents the word cloud of keywords plus for
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blockchain technology in FAI, which supports the findings shown in

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Figure 7.
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Figure 7: Co-occurrence of authors’ keywords
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Figure 8: Word cloud of keywords plus

This study employed the Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) to analyse the author
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keywords through the R package bibliometrix. MCA is a data analysis approach that could be

applied to the graphical analysis of the categorical data (Aria and Cuccurullo, 2017). The

present study selected MCA since this analysis can help to recognise the thematic structure

among a series of authors’ keywords. In the MCA approach, the keywords are clustered based

on their closeness, which can be a categorical presentation of how commonly-used keywords

are applied together (Demiroz and Haase, 2019). For instance, if two different keywords (e.g.,
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blockchain and agriculture) are used simultaneously in multiple articles, these keywords can

be clustered together (Aria and Cuccurullo, 2017).

Figure 9 presents the authors’ keywords conceptual structure associated with the blockchain

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publications in the food and agriculture domain. This figure shows that the publications

involved in the analysis are classified into three main clusters, which indicates the intellectual

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structure of blockchain technology in food and agriculture studies.

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Figure 9: Conceptual map of authors’ keywords in blockchain technology in FAI articles

Figure 10 presents the network view map of the terms extracted from the abstracts and the

titles of the publications. As illustrated in the network map, the obtained words are designated

by labels. In some instances, the labels are not presented to avoid overlapping in each circle.

The occurrence of an item defines the circle’s size. The colour represents the cluster to which
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the terms belong, and the lines define the connections among the terms. The distance of the

items demonstrates the strength of the relationships. For example, terms nearer to each other

have stronger relationships compared with the farther terms (Eck and Waltman, 2019). As

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displayed in Figure 10, the most commonly-occurring terms (large circles) are traceability,

transaction, IoT, safety, food supply chain, product, quality, security, challenge, agriculture,

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and development. The VOSviewer software classified the most frequently used terms into three

clusters by the bibliometric mapping. The red- and green-coloured clusters formed larger

groups compared to the blue-coloured one. The red cluster contains the terms more focused on

the traceability system and the involved stakeholders for tracking the quality and safety of
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products. The green cluster consists of the terms focused on technological issues of blockchain

technology and architecture and the integration of the technology with the IoT to improve the

transaction and security of the technology. On the other hand, the blue cluster is more

concentrated on the research development and the benefits of the blockchain systems such as
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efficiency and trust.

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Figure 10: Network view map generated by VOSviewer
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5. Discussion

The obtained results revealed that blockchain technology in FAI is in its infancy and
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publications are very limited in this field of study. At the time of conducting this study, 171

FAI papers were obtained from the Scopus database. The majority of studies were focused on

IoT technology and the supply chain in the FAI. For example, Tian (2016) developed and

examined a traceability system for agri-food supply chain using the radio-frequency
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identification (RFID) and blockchain technology. He investigated the drawbacks and benefits

of the traceability system and stressed that the system would guarantee food safety effectively.

In a similar study, Tian (2017) developed a traceability system for the food supply chain based

upon IoT, blockchain, and hazard analysis critical control point (HACCP) to present a platform

for supply chain stakeholders with openness, transparency, security, neutrality, and reliability.
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This system is particularly critical for cold chain maintenance in the logistics of the distribution

of perishable food products (such as meat and dairy products).

Malik et al. (2018) offered a blockchain-based framework, called ProductChain, which was

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governed by the government and the regulatory agencies to promote food provenance. The

framework guarantees that the flow of the trade is held confidential when stakeholders and

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consumers retrieve the provenance information. In another study conducted by Caro et al.

(2018), a decentralised traceability system based on blockchain, called AgriBlockIoT, was

presented for agri-food supply chain management. This system was capable of integrating IoT

technologies producing and utilising digital data throughout the chain coherently. In addition,
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Kaijun et al. (2018) offered a blockchain-based agricultural business resource according to a

double-chain structure that provided a matching mechanism and adaptive rent-seeking for the

public service platform.

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In a case study, Casado-Vara et al. (2018) introduced a new blockchain-based model of the

agriculture supply chain to enable the circular economy concept and decrease the limitations

of the present supply chain by employing a multi-agent system. Moreover, Mao et al. (2018)
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provided a blockchain-based credit evaluation system to fortify the effectiveness of

management and surveillance in the food supply chain by gathering the credit evaluation text

from the stakeholders through the smart contract. In another study, Mao et al. (2018) offered a

new blockchain-based food trading mechanism to eliminate the asymmetry of information and
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establish a sustainable market environment.

In a research carried out by Xie et al. (2017), a blockchain-based scheme was designed to

track the agricultural products data using double-chain storage to solve the difficulties of

storing custom data in the blockchain. Finally, Patil et al. (2018) presented a blockchain-based

model to provide security and privacy for smart greenhouse farms considering the IoT security
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and privacy challenges to create a distributed ledger of transactions shared between the nodes

of the IoT network.

In general, applying blockchain technology to FAI has several benefits for all stakeholders

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involved. According to Bermeo-Almeida et al. (2018), the information in the blockchain-based

supply chain is open and transparent. Moreover, blockchain addresses IoT challenges such as

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anonymity, decentralisation, and security, and improves efficient operations, reliability, and

scalability.

6. Conclusion, Limitations, and Recommendations for Future Research

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This study provides the results of a bibliometric analysis of a total of 171 papers on the food

and agriculture industry (FAI) published between 2016 and 2019. The present study was
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conducted using the VOSviewer software and R package bibliometrix. The findings indicated

that the research into the concept of blockchain in the FAI started in 2016 and continued to

receive increasingly the attention of scholars, particularly in 2019. Moreover, the results

demonstrated that India, China, and the USA are the leading countries in publishing articles in
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blockchain technology in FAI. The results also showed that traceability, supply chain, IoT,

smart contract, and food safety are the top keywords that have occurred most frequently in this

context. Based on the findings, IoT technology has been widely applied to developing the

blockchain systems in FAI. In addition, the findings generated by the network view map
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disclosed that the blockchain literature, as it exists within the field of FAI, is classified into

three clusters. These three clusters were organised as the traceability system, the technological

issues of blockchain, and the research development and benefits of the blockchain. The findings

of this paper can assist researchers and policymakers in FAI by offering a comprehensive

picture of blockchain research.

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Despite scientific contributions, this paper has its limitations. Data was collected from the

Scopus database. Therefore, the limitations of this database may have been applied in this

study. For instance, the Scopus database collects information using a full counting system.

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Thus, papers with a large number of co-authors are usually more important in analysis than

those with only one author. To solve this challenge, this paper also used fractional counting in

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mapping analysis using VOSviewer software. The analysis considered the following: co-

citation, bibliographic coupling, and co-occurrence of author keywords. However, the

fractional and full counting results were quite similar. Therefore, it can be concluded that there

is no significant deviation between the two counting methods, and the results obtained in this

paper are reliable.

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As research on the use of blockchain technology in the FAI is increasing significantly

annually, the results obtained in this paper are dynamic and will change over time. Hence, it is
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suggested that this research be repeated in the coming years. Although agriculture is one of the

most important economic sectors in developed countries, the results show that developing

countries have made more efforts to develop blockchain technology research in the FAI.
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However, more research is needed on the benefits and challenges of implementing blockchain

in the food and agriculture industry in both developing and developed countries.
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Highlights

 Study on blockchain in FAI has emerged after 2016 and is on the early stages of
research.

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 India tops the countries publishing articles of blockchain in FAI followed by China.

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 Three clusters of themes of current research studies were identified.

 Institutional collaborations on blockchain research are still limited in the FAI.

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Declaration of interests

☒ The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships
that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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☐The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered
as potential competing interests:

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