On April 3rd 2020, as a result of work conducted within the Organic-PLUS project, the review article ‘Organic livestock production: a bibliometric review’ was published in the peer-reviewed academic journal ‘Animals’. Led by Dr Carmen L. Manuelian from O+ parter University of Padova, the review presents a bibliometric approach to organic livestock production and provides an overview of the research conducted on this topic. It highlights tendencies, identifies the countries involved in organic livestock production research and the scientific interaction between countries and authors, and maps the keywords of the published papers. These are all important aspects to bear in mind when embarking upon a new research area or writing a research proposal.
The review reveals an increasing interest in organic livestock production, which can be scientifically measured by the number of projects funded by governmental organisations and the number of published papers. Countries with a long-tradition in organic farming (German-speaking and English-speaking countries, and France) are still the predominant countries in organic livestock research. Collaborations among countries are still scarce, and probably triggered by geographical and historical relationships and languages. Some limitations of the search (e.g. database used, keywords, software for the analysis, language of the documents) and metadata linked to the documents (e.g. type of document, total citations) have to be accounted for when interpreting the results. Therefore, a bibliometric review is an interesting and reliable method when approaching a specific topic for the first time.
‘Animals’ is a peer-reviewed open access journal (ISSN 2076-2615; Q1 journal in the category ‘Agriculture, Dairy & Animal Science’) and the paper is open access and free to view here – www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/10/4/618.
organic-plus.net 