Village chicken production and food security: a two-decade bibliometric analysis of global research trends

Abstract Background The present study aimed to reveal outputs of research works on village chicken production as a tool to combat food insecurity, taking into account the recurring challenge posed by food shortage and high rise in hunger among vulnerable people of several countries. Results On aggregate, 104 publications were obtained in a BibTeX design for analysis using bibliometric package in R studio. The obtained data comprised, but not limited to authors, citations, institutions, key words and journals. Published articles on village chicken production with relation to food security retrieved from web of science (WOS) and Scopus data banks were utilized with a rise in research publications of a yearly growth of 12.93% during the study period. With regard to country, USA was ranked first with an aggregate sum of publications (n = 16), and a huge global academic influence with most top article citations (n = 509). The frequently used authors’ keywords in this studied research area were food security (n = 23), poultry (n = 9), chickens (n = 7), backyard poultry (n = 5), gender (n = 4), which all together created a hint on related studies on village chicken production and food security. Conclusions The present study provides a worldwide situation that traverse the intellectual quandary on village chicken production and food security research, and a direction for further researches in this field. It is very vital to emphasize that the current study only dealt with principal areas of village chicken production as related to food security research, hence, it is projected that new empirical research and prospective research findings would afford new knowledge and insight on village chicken production as a means to address food security challenges as new studies evolves.