# Assessment of Several Approaches to Biofortified Products: A Literature Review
## 2 Materials and Methods
### Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria  
Writing takes the form of a literature review, a chronological/conceptual review of international literature [20]. As shown in Table 2, a documentary study was conducted in September 2020 where several publications in the scientific literature on biofortified products are reported (see the Supplementary Material). The first step of the work concerned the search and selection of the studies under investigation. The search used Boolean strategy where the combination of the following keywords was used \"Biofortification\" OR \"Biofortified\" OR \"Bioforti\", AND/NOT Micronutrient, Functional food. A database with 3106 papers was created and divided by national and international journals. This construction was based on the Scopus-Elsevier database, one of the most comprehensive databases containing high-quality, peer-reviewed publications [22]. Subsequently, the database was limited by extrapolating only \"Final Articles,\" published in Journal, in English and disseminated between 2003 and 2020. As already mentioned in relation to the authors' areas of interest and research the study was limited to five subject areas: Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Economics, Econometrics and Finance, Social Sciences, Multidisciplinary and Business. Scientific books and articles not published in full or otherwise not available online were not taken into account. Table 2 presents a sample from the search results for biofortified products, during the literature review. We chose to extrapolate from the sample only those countries with a number greater than or equal to 30 papers for their relevancy. The final database includes 1189 papers. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c} \hline \hline
**Search term** & **Hits** \\ \hline Biofortification & 2,817 \\ Biofortified & 914 \\ Fortification & 13,894 \\ Functional food & 70,033 \\ Micronutrient & 32,461 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular} Note: Our elaboration.  
\end{table} 
Table 1: Number of papers published by year. All 1189 abstracts were checked for relevance and divided into the five dimensions of the definition types studied. Then the countries with the highest number of articles (>30) in our sample were examined. Table 3 shows the complete list of countries that were considered for the review. The results suggest that studies are concentrated in those countries with the most relevant issues, related to malnutrition, health problems, agronomic practices, economic and market decisions, etc. India is the most frequent target (260 papers), USA (244), followed by China (157). For European countries, United Kingdom (66), Italy and Spain with 62 papers, Poland (55), and Germany (51) stand out. The study of the definition and use of biofortified products has received and is still receiving a considerable attention from the academic world, as evidenced by the large and growing number of papers that continue to be published today. The assumptions summarized above show that there is an interest in biofortified products and its effects are becoming more and more intense, both in the academic and business world, which is now looking at these products as a great opportunity to increase its competitive advantage. For the analysis of the second research question proposed in the introduction (RQ2) we have adopted the main framework for the conceptualization of biofortification. In relation to the authors' areas of study and research, five dimensions [23] were chosen closely linked to the definition of biofortified products:  
1. Reduction of world hunger;
2. Human health;
3. GMOs;
4. Agronomy, herbaceous crops;
5. Economics and the market. Regarding the biofortification research area addressed in the articles in our sample, the results show that 375 out of 1189 papers (31.5%) consider the \"agronomy, herbaceous cultivation\" dimension of biofortification to some extent. In addition, 339 papers (28.5%) address the \"human health\" dimension of biofortification and 201 papers (16.9%) only talk about the \"GMO\" dimension.