Evaluating research trends in urban agricultural indicators through bibliometrics

The role of Urban Agriculture (UA) in achieving food security and sustainability couldn't be overemphasized. Further, indicators are critical to the measurement of the role of Urban Agriculture in enhancing food security and sustainability and to understand the trade-offs between the two. The purpose of the paper is to identify, analyze, and synthesize research on Urban Agriculture Indicators (UAI) to identify gaps in information and scout for future directions and scope for research. This paper presents a review of the body of literature on Urban Agriculture Indicators using bibliometric analysis; the search was made on the Web of Science and Scopus databases up to May 2025. After removal of duplicates and cleaning the dataset 504 records were subjected to bibliometric analysis using the Biblioshiny tool to address the research questions. Our findings reflect a significant growth, underlining the increasing importance of UAI in addressing issues of urban resilience and sustainability. We observed that the UAI research is incidental to research in Agriculture, Urbanisation and Sustainability related areas and is yet to mature as a separate discipline. Multifunctional and diverse nature of UA, lack of methodological robustness and ad hoc borrowing of indicators from other domains make indicators less relevant in assessment of UA. There is a thematic shift from a siloed disciplinary focus to a systems approach in UAI development. The data used was sourced form WoS and Scopus database only. The paper points out the lopsided nature of indicator development for UA, identifies challenges associated with UAI development and suggests measures to overcome the limitations to make it more relevant. We also suggest areas for future research to improve their adaptability.