Tracing the Trajectory of Food-Energy-Water Nexus Literature: A Bibliometric Analysis.

It has become common in academia and practice for certain phrase to quickly become 'buzzwords,' that are thrown around within contexts other than the original connotation or intent. Thus, it is necessary to take a step back to evaluate how the use of the phrase is evolving and how far does its use diverge from the original intent. This study conducted a bibliometric analysis of publications that used the phrase "Food-Energy-Water (FEW) Nexus" since it was introduced in the Bonn 2011 Conference as an integrative resource management approach. The goal was to appraise trends emerging from the evolving paradigm. Elsevier Science's SCOPUS database was used to conduct a search for 'food, energy and water nexus' in the title. Resulting abstracts were reviewed and those that did not include all three resource identifiers were eliminated. BibExcel software was used to conduct bibliometric analysis of the 260 publications compiled, while Vosveiwer and Word Cloud were used for visualization of the results. Characteristics of publications such as number of publications, number of citations, top publishing journals, publication types, and regions of study were evaluated. It was determined that the number of publications has continued to grow at a steady rate from 2011 with about 63% being peer-reviewed articles. Reviews and conference papers were next. A list of the top ten journals where the selected works were published, the number of papers published, and impact factor of journals are presented. Also, peer reviewed publications with the most citations are identified. To address the question of emerging themes, core research questions within each selected work were analyzed, and 16 author and title keywords were ranked according to the number of occurrences. This analysis revealed the path that FEW Nexus research has taken over the years. Findings from this study help trace the trajectory of FEW Nexus research and calls for more studies from social science perspective if the goals laid out in the Bonn 2011 Conference paper are to be achieved.