Feeding nine billion, climate impacts, soils and nutrients, household food insecurity and health: the most-cited research, recent reviews and search strings.
Food security spans two literatures. The global one, in journals such as Science and Nature Food, asks how to feed a growing population under climate change: Godfray et al. (2010) is its most-cited paper, with Wheeler and von Braun (2013) on climate impacts. The household one, in nutrition and public health journals, measures food insecurity and its consequences: Gundersen and Ziliak (2015) on health outcomes is the entry. Schmidhuber and Tubiello (2007) name four main elements of food security: availability, stability, utilisation and access.
How the literature is organised
Godfray et al. (2010), "Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People", argued that demand for food will keep growing for decades while competition for land, water and energy increases, that the world can produce more food and use it more efficiently and equitably, and that this needs a multifaceted and linked global strategy. It has about 12,000 citations in OpenAlex. Around it sit papers on specific constraints: soil carbon (Lal, 2004), phosphorus as a finite resource (Cordell, Drangert and White, 2009), plant disease (Ristaino et al., 2021, on emerging pandemics) and the tension with biodiversity (Tscharntke et al., 2012).
Climate change is the largest sub-literature. Schmidhuber and Tubiello (2007) reviewed the likely impact of climate change on all four dimensions of food security and found that models addressed only availability, Lobell et al. (2008) identified the crops and regions most in need of adaptation by 2030, Wheeler and von Braun (2013) reviewed impacts, and Lipper et al. (2014) set out climate-smart agriculture.
The household literature is more applied. Gundersen and Ziliak (2015) reviewed evidence on the health consequences of food insecurity for children, adults and seniors in the United States and report that the literature consistently finds a negative association with health.
Main debates
One debate is about production and access. Godfray et al. (2010) hold that more food can be produced but must also be used more efficiently and equitably, and Schmidhuber and Tubiello (2007) point out that modelling concentrates on availability and neglects access, utilisation and stability. A second concerns how to produce: Tscharntke et al. (2012) discuss agricultural intensification in relation to biodiversity conservation, and Bezner Kerr et al. (2021) review whether agroecology can improve food security and nutrition.
Where recent work is heading
Recent highly cited work deals with shocks and extremes (Hasegawa et al., 2021; Ben Hassen and El Bilali, 2022), plant pathogens under climate change (Singh et al., 2023), fertiliser use (Penuelas, Coello and Sardans, 2023), staple value chains in Africa and Asia (Grote et al., 2021) and national policy, such as land use in China (Liu and Zhou, 2021). Universal school meals have been reviewed for their effects on participation, attendance and diet (Cohen et al., 2021).
Most-cited foundational papers
Published before 2021 and ranked by how often later work cites them. Read the abstract of each and the full text of the three or four closest to your question. Citation count measures attention, not quality, so treat this as a map of what the field has argued about rather than a ranking of what is true.
Craig Gundersen, James P. Ziliak (2015). Health Affairs.
Cited by 1,907doi:10.1377/hlthaff.2015.0645
Most-cited papers since 2021
Primary studies and conceptual papers from 2021 onwards. A paper published in 2024 has had a few years to accumulate citations where the works in the section above have had decades, so compare these counts with each other rather than with the ones above.
Cited by 404Open accessdoi:10.1186/s40066-023-00409-5
Recent reviews and meta-analyses
The fastest way into a literature. A good review gives you the structure of the field, a reference list to mine and, in its limitations section, the gaps other researchers have already spotted.
Rachel Bezner Kerr and 9 others (2021). Global Food Security.
Cited by 351doi:10.1016/j.gfs.2021.100540
How big the literature is, and where it is published
OpenAlex indexes 64,330 works whose title matches this topic. The chart shows how many were published each year from 2000 to 2025; the current year is left out because it is incomplete.
Show the numbers as a table
Year
Works
2000
319
2001
361
2002
387
2003
401
2004
436
2005
449
2006
472
2007
559
2008
779
2009
1,105
2010
1,333
2011
1,592
2012
1,892
2013
2,169
2014
2,495
2015
2,522
2016
2,634
2017
2,636
2018
2,946
2019
3,142
2020
3,682
2021
3,925
2022
3,833
2023
4,552
2024
5,079
2025
6,385
Journals behind the most-cited work
Counted across the 362 most-cited works on the topic, not across everything published. Browsing recent issues of the first two or three is a reliable way to find current work that has not yet been cited much.
Journal of Nutrition14 papers
Global Food Security13 papers
Nature Food13 papers
Science13 papers
Food Security11 papers
Food Policy9 papers
Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems9 papers
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences7 papers
Search strings to copy
Written for databases that accept Boolean operators (Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC, PubMed, EBSCO). Quotation marks keep a phrase together, an asterisk stands in for the end of a word, and OR groups go in brackets. British and American spellings are written out with OR rather than covered by a single-character wildcard, because those wildcards differ between databases: PubMed’s help page documents the asterisk only, and asks for at least four characters before it. Limit the search to title and abstract first; widen it only if you get too little. Our guide to starting a literature review covers how to record what you searched.
Household food insecurity and health
("food insecurity" OR "food security") AND (household* OR child* OR student*) AND (health OR nutrition OR "mental health" OR "academic performance")
Climate change and food production
("food security") AND ("climate change" OR drought OR "extreme weather") AND (yield* OR production OR adaptation OR smallholder*)
Measurement
("food insecurity" OR "food security") AND (HFIAS OR FIES OR "experience scale" OR measurement OR indicator*)
Explore food security in Wonders →Opens Wonders on this question. Once you are signed in it becomes a project with suggested sub-topics and keywords you can edit before searching. The trial is 14 days.
Sub-topics to narrow into
A thesis-sized question usually sits inside one of these, combined with a population or a setting.
Global supply and sustainable intensification
Godfray et al. (2010) on the overall challenge; Tscharntke et al. (2012) on reconciling it with biodiversity conservation.
Schmidhuber and Tubiello (2007), Wheeler and von Braun (2013), Lipper et al. (2014) on climate-smart agriculture, Hasegawa et al. (2021) on extreme events.
Soils and nutrients
Lal (2004) on soil carbon; Cordell, Drangert and White (2009) on phosphorus; Penuelas, Coello and Sardans (2023) on fertilisers.
Gundersen and Ziliak (2015); school meals reviewed by Cohen et al. (2021).
Shocks and conflict
Ben Hassen and El Bilali (2022) on the Russia-Ukraine war.
How to cite these papers
Every paper above has a DOI, a part of the reference that is easy to leave out. Here is one of them, “Soil Carbon Sequestration Impacts on Global Climate Change and Food Security” (2004), in the two styles students ask about most:
APA 7th edition
Lal, R. (2004). Soil carbon sequestration impacts on global climate change and food security. Science, 304(5677), 1623–1627. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1097396
MLA 9th edition
Lal, R. “Soil Carbon Sequestration Impacts on Global Climate Change and Food Security.” Science, vol. 304, no. 5677, 2004, pp. 1623–27, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1097396.
Check the details against the article itself before you submit: databases, including the one behind this page, sometimes carry the online-first year rather than the volume year. Full rules and more examples are in our guides to APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver and ABNT, with the rest in the citation guides. You can also format a reference from its DOI with our free citation tools.
Frequently asked questions
What are the dimensions of food security?
Schmidhuber and Tubiello (2007) work with four main elements: availability, stability, utilisation and access. They found that simulation studies of climate change routinely addressed only the first. For the official definitions, go to the FAO and Committee on World Food Security documents themselves and cite those.
Where can I find the numbers on global hunger?
The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World is an annual report prepared jointly by FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, and it presents the headline number of undernourished people. It is a report, so cite it directly; it is not in the lists on this page.
Food security or food insecurity: does the term matter for searching?
Yes. On this page the agricultural and environmental papers say food security, while Gundersen and Ziliak (2015), on health outcomes in the United States, say food insecurity. Use both terms, and expect the two sets of results to look different.
How this page was made
The lists come from OpenAlex, an open index of scholarly works whose data are published under a CC0 licence, queried on September 21, 2026 for works whose title matches ("food security" OR "food insecurity"). Only works with a DOI are listed. Each one was checked against the publisher’s own record at Crossref or DataCite (title, year, first author, journal, volume and pages), and in three cases, where the publisher deposited no byline, against PubMed; anything OpenAlex or Crossref flags as retracted was left out, and an editor took out results that matched the words but not the subject. Citation counts are OpenAlex’s on that date and are usually lower than Google Scholar’s, which counts more kinds of document. Ranking by citations tells you what a field has relied on, not what is correct; several heavily cited papers on any topic are cited because later work disputes them. Books without a DOI are missing, which matters in fields where the founding text is a book.
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