Organic Food And Farming Scaling: A Search Strategy To Identify Relevant Literature

Summary

While Organic food and farming (OFF) sector grows, this development is gaining interest in the scientific arena. As part of its new program on organic scaling (METABIO), INRAE wishes to monitor and analyze the evolution of the scientific literature on the conditions, determinants and consequences of this transition. But, building a search query, ie a combination of keywords to get relevant literature from a bibliographical database, is yet challenging on such emergent and fuzzy topic. We present here the search strategy we developed based on both expert knowledge and an iterative and inductive process of lexical query improvement.We show that our sophistication approach allows to capture literature with a good quality. Moreover, we detail the constraints weighting on such a strategy and the advantages of the iterative approach in the acquisition of knowledge on organic scaling.