Food Safety in China: The Structure and Substantive Foci of an Emerging Field of Social Science Research

This paper is the first to describe the structure and content of the English language social science literature on food safety in China. To do this research we systematically searched Web of Science and Scopus, the most comprehensive indexes, using the terms “Food Safety” AND “China” OR “Chinese”. T...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social sciences (Basel) 2018-06, Vol.7 (7), p.107
Main Authors: Dickinson, Harley, Liu, Willa, Graham, Paul, Chen, Wei
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
abstract analysis
Agriculture
Baby foods
Bibliometrics
China
Consumers
Content analysis
Economic development
English language
Environmental health
Food
Food contamination & poisoning
Food safety
food safety system
Health surveillance
Illnesses
Indexes
Interdisciplinary aspects
International trade
keyword analysis
Knowledge management
literature mapping
NVivo Software
Public health
Safety
Scientometrics
Social research
Social sciences
Sociology
Teachers
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This paper is the first to describe the structure and content of the English language social science literature on food safety in China. To do this research we systematically searched Web of Science and Scopus, the most comprehensive indexes, using the terms “Food Safety” AND “China” OR “Chinese”. To focus our search results, we used the index features available on Web of Science and Scopus, and limited results to the English language, peer-reviewed journal articles, social sciences, and published in the period of 2009 to 2015. This resulted in 272 selected journal articles, with a final data set of 185 articles for review. A food safety system model we developed was used to classify and present the findings derived from content analysis of abstracts, titles, and keywords. Our findings show that the research reviewed is unevenly distributed across the components of the food safety system model. The greatest proportions of the literature reviewed focused on consumers, primary and secondary producers and products, and government legislators and regulators, respectively. Smaller proportions focused on food wholesalers, retailers, researchers, educators, and the media. Few of the articles reviewed used a model of the food safety system. None identified an explicit knowledge transfer strategy.
ISSN:2076-0760
2076-0760
DOI:10.3390/socsci7070107