State of the art on research about organic certification: a systematic literature review

In recent years, interest in the production and consumption of more sustainable food has been growing, resulting in the expansion of the global market for organic products. A product to be marketed as organic must go through a process that certifies its compliance with organic production rules, allowing the producers to use a seal that indicates that the product is organic. In this study, we carry out an analysis of scientific literature addressing organic certification. This is a descriptive study, which adopted bibliometric survey and integrative review as methodologies. We analyzed 164 articles from four internationally relevant databases using the software Iramuteq. Our findings indicate that organic certification is a new theme in the scientific literature, and the number of published papers on organic certification has grown significantly in the last decade. The results indicate that 71% of the analyzed articles related to organic certification to social and governance issues, while 29% related to technical production issues. Researchers based in the USA and Italy were the ones who published the most on the topic, and the analyzed articles are distributed through 85 different journals. We indicate that future research shall devote attention to the factors influencing the quantity and the theme of organic certification publications in different countries and continents.