Research trends on food safety and sanitation in hospitality and tourism

The present study examines research trends on food safety/sanitation in 16 leading hospitality and tourism (H&T) journals from 1976-2016. The researchers developed a database of 5,333 articles related to food. Of this number, only 45 articles were related to food safety and published across eight H&T journals from 1976 to 2016. Thus, despite the size of the industry and importance of the topic, there still remains a dearth of food safety/sanitation publications. This article provides the first systematic analysis on food safety/sanitation research in the H&T context. It offers an analysis of the broad features of literature on food safety in the H&T context with a focus on international collaboration, highly productive countries, institutions and authors, methods of research, publication years, and journal distribution. In addition to highlighting a scarcity in advanced statistical research methods and international collaboration, the research findings also suggest that the majority of the studies analysed were empirical and conducted using quantitative methods.