Farmers’ Market Actors, Dynamics, and Attributes: A Bibliometric Study

Farmers’ markets aim to bring producers and consumers together under direct marketing schemes, also known as alternative food networks, for local and sustainable production and consumption of food. A number of studies concerning this subject have been published, however, as yet no updated reviews exist that might allow us to understand the trends in research on farmers’ markets. The objective of this study was to examine the farmers’ market literature using bibliometric tools. A total of 438 peer-reviewed publications, indexed in the abstract and citation meta-database Scopus (Elsevier®), for the period of 1979 to September 24, 2018, were considered. In the second phase, publications in the area of medicine were excluded, resulting in 295 publications being analyzed for the same period. The results showed that these publications focused on three main areas: markets, health programs, and food safety. Upon exclusion of the medical publications, the remaining works focused on farmers’ market actors, dynamics, and attributes: vendors (producers and others), consumers, the community, and supporting actors and institutions (government, NGOs, individuals). Therefore, it is concluded that there is no single type of farmers’ market, nor of farmers’ market vendors or consumers. This makes the reproduction of such spaces difficult, especially when the goals are to benefit local production systems or the nutrition of the local community.