Horizon-scanning the ostrich industry with bibliometric indicators
From the domestication of the ostrich to the deregulation of the industry, the ostrich industry experienced rapid growth and changes in research, intellectual property, innovation and technology transfer. Ostrich production is typical of industrial agriculture, which combines techno-scientific methods with an intensive agro-processing value chain. Since the processing of the leather, meat, feathers and skins requires substantial technological know-how and advanced equipment, it has resulted in vast amounts of research and advisory literature emerging from private companies, co-operatives and industry organisations. Researchers conducting literature studies face an increasingly complex amount of literature, and the ‘research landscape’ is also in a continuous state of change. This article turns a vice into a virtue: it deals with the analysis and mapping of the large volumes of academic literature on ostrich husbandry found in the Google Scholar database (GS) by means of a word analysis of titles and keywords in abstracts to determine ostrich-related ‘research foci’.
The results suggest that there are associations between the deregulation of the industry and increased emerging ostrich research, between the time of political isolation of South Africa and substantially increased global research on ostrich reproduction by 1996, and between epidemiological research and the outbreak of the avian influenza virus between 2004 and 2006. This indicative study contributes to the development of a novel prototype for the prediction of future developments and trends in agricultural research
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