Food security represents one of the most pressing challenges to humankind to be faced in the twenty-first century. Food security is a complex issue dealing with multiple research domains, among which human health and nutrition, environment, and policy. Several recent studies showed that biodiversity loss, soil erosion, and water scarcity are key problems exacerbating the issue of food security at local and global scale. The attention towards the issue of food security, highly recognized by international policy and scientific research, has considerably increased over the last decades. In this context, it is expected that the scientific literature on food security will continue increasing over the next years. The present study aims at exploring the global scientific literature on food security tracking its evolution and trends by applying social network analysis to bibliometric science. The bibliometric analysis performed over the timeframe 1990-2019 allowed the generation of maps based on network data displaying the relationships among scientific journals, researchers, and countries. Results showed that a number of 19,449 publications on food security were published from 193 countries in 3792 journals with 219 different subject categories. Mario Herrero resulted the most productive author with 50 documents, while USA resulted the first country publishing 5634 documents on food security. Among the journals, Food Security ranked first by total link strength, links, and number of documents, while Science showed the highest number of citations. The co-occurrence network map of keywords showed that, over the last decades, the main focus of food security research has shifted from socio-economic to environmental aspects. In conclusion, the integration of social network analysis and bibliometric science resulted a useful approach capable of capturing the multidimensional nature of food security by analyzing a large amount of literature data while identifying the main scientific patterns in this field of science.
