Research approaches in the latin american scientific literature on agave mezcaleroMezcal production experienced significant growth over the past decade, accompanied by a surge in related research that has not been systematically analyzed using quantitative methods. The Scielo database, composed primarily of Latin American, and particularly Mexican, publications, reflects this increased interest. Therefore, this study identified trends in scientific knowledge through a bibliometric analysis of international publications indexed in Scielo. Using the software VOSviewer, a dataset of 107 articles published between 2005 and 2024 was processed. The analysis considered the following elements: (1) keyword co-occurrence and text mining of title and abstract terms; (2) co-author groupings; and (3) the resulting links in references and the institutions with the highest number of published documents. Six thematic clusters were identified, corresponding to the following topics: the use of substrates for agave nursery production; wild species; fermentation and mezcal production processes; biodiversity and species distribution; agave reproduction via seed and in vitro methods; and soil studies and agave nutrition. No dominant collaboration network was observed among co-author groups. Through bibliographic coupling analysis, the most influential agronomic studies were identified based on total link strength. The Interdisciplinary Research Center for Regional Integral Development, Oaxaca Unit of the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, was found to be the most prominently engaged in agave-mezcal research. The analysis concluded that the predominant research approaches have focused on the study of wild agave species, improvement of distillation processes, socio-economic studies on traditional knowledge, the use of substrates, and agave nutrition.
Key words:
mezcal production; biodiversity; in vitro reproduction; fermentation; agronomic management
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