Exploring food security as a multidimensional topic: twenty years of scientific publications and recent developments.

The scientific literature dealing with food security is vast and fragmented, making it difficult to understand the state of the art and potential development of scientific research on a central theme within sustainable development. The current article, starting from some milestone publications during the 1980s and 1990s about food poverty and good nutrition programmes, sets out the quantitative and qualitative aspects of a vast scientific production that could generate future food security research. It offers an overview of the topics that characterize the theoretical and empirical dimensions of food security, maps the state of the art, and highlights trends in publications' ascending and descending themes.