Research trends on Pekasam as heritage food in Malaysia

Understanding heritage food is important and useful for planning of national identity conservation, gastronomy tourism marketing and food safety. However, research on heritage food is not uniform globally; it tends to be concentrated in specific areas or region, and thus would hinder our understanding of heritage food acceptance, marketability and sustainability. This study examined the trends in heritage food research, namely Pekasam over the past decade by analysing publication data from Scopus through Systematic Literature review method. In particular, this study focused on the countries in which the studies were done, the affiliation of the authors, the funding sponsor, the types of publication discipline area of research, and citation details. A total of 148 publications were examined. The results showed that research on heritage food of Pekasam is not only scarce, to such an extent a large number of the research published are in the discipline of agriculture, chemistry and engineering. Despite the small number of research publications on Pekasam, the citations on the existing publications have grown exponentially since 2017 indicating that Pekasam is a potential research topic in the area of heritage food.