Organic livestock production: a bibliometric analysis

The organic livestock sector in the European Union has been experiencing a fast growth and, lately, organic farming has become a trending topic. A bibliometric review has been performed to summarise the research developed on organic livestock farming. The bibliographic search was done on Web of Science during April 2018 selecting those papers that dealt with organic livestock. The analysis was carried out with the package ‘bibliometrix’ for R. Since 1993, a total of 306 research outputs (254 journal articles and 52 proceeding articles) have been published focussing on organic livestock farming, with an annual growth rate of 1.70% and a clear increase since 2005, which seems to follow the increasing interest on that topic by consumers and markets. The 254 papers have been published in 109 journals, and only 61.5% of them are in journals of the 1st and 2nd quartile of the relevant subject area. Germany is the country with more papers published on organic livestock farming (50 documents), followed by Denmark (29), France (28) and the Netherlands (17). In Europe, the most important species reared organically, with the exception of poultry, are sheep (42%) – mainly in United Kingdom – and cattle (34%) – mainly in Germany and Austria, followed by pigs (9%) – mainly in Denmark – and goats (7%) – mainly in Greece. Authors’ top 10 keywords were: organic farming (74 times), organic, animal welfare, animal health, cattle, livestock, farming, organic agriculture, organic livestock production and health (10 times each). Even if poultry is the most important species reared organically in Europe only the term ‘cattle’ appeared as an indicator of the species studied within those keywords. This could indicate that more research has been done in cattle because of the importance of this species in Germany. Moreover, the presence of the terms ‘animal welfare’ and ‘animal health’ within those keywords seems to indicate that the research on organic livestock production has been focussing on these two areas, which are the major concern for consumers on organic farming. This bibliometric analysis revealed that: (i) countries focalised their research on their main production, (ii) more research on organic livestock production in other species than cattle is needed, and (iii) more and more high-quality research on this topic is needed.