Two decades of rice research in Indonesia and the Philippines: A systematic review and research agenda for the social sciences

While rice studies are abundant, they usually focus on macro-level rice production and yield data, genetic diversity, cultivar varieties, and agrotechnological innovations. Moreover, many of these studies are either region-wide or concentrated on countries in the Global North. Collecting, synthesizing, and analyzing the different themes and topic areas in rice research since the beginning of the 21st century, especially in the Global South, remain unaddressed areas. This study contributes to filling these research lacunae by systematically reviewing 2243 rice-related articles cumulatively written by more than 6000 authors and published in over 900 scientific journals. Using the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, this study screened and retrieved articles published from 2001 to 2021 on the various topics and questions surrounding rice research in Indonesia and the Philippines—two rice-producing and -consuming, as well as emerging economies in Southeast Asia. Using a combination of bibliometrics and quantitative content analysis, this paper discusses the productive, relevant, and influential rice scholars; key institutions, including affiliations, countries, and funders; important articles and journals; and knowledge hotspots in these two countries. It also discusses the contributions of the social sciences, highlights key gaps, and provides a research agenda across six interdisciplinary areas for future studies. This paper mainly argues that an interdisciplinary and comparative inquiry of potentially novel topic areas and research questions could deepen and widen scholarly interests beyond conventional natural science-informed rice research in Indonesia and the Philippines. Finally, this paper serves other researchers in their review of other crops in broader global agriculture.