Global literature review - Indonesia pilot tagging

Title: Report on literature review manual tagging and filtering

Author: Eric Thrift

Date: 2018-09-06

Indonesia

I coded the records in the “Indonesia” item set on a trial basis. There were initially 53 items in the collection, three of which I discarded as being entirely unrelated to dried fish.

I focused on performing a triage based on the relevance codes and 7 themes, just looking at the titles and abstracts on the first review. I found it helpful to mark each item as having “direct” or “indirect” relevance on initial triage, but leave the theme code empty if the item needed further inspection.

For items related to other places (e.g., texts about African dried fish) I applied the tag “#REGION: other”. In the case of items that were about the global context, or about dried fish technology in general, I applied the tag “#REGION: none”. Every other resource seemed to be accurately tagged, though a few were primarily about another country with incidental mention of Indonesia. (For instance: Belton et al. 2011 is about Bangladesh, but includes the sentence “Unlike other Asian countries such as Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam where commercial cage culture for a number of species is a well established practice, cage culture in Bangladesh remains fairly limited at present”.) So it may not be necessary to apply geographic focus tags manually, but we can see what we find with the remaining sources.

The historical coverage tags were generally not relevant to a majority of items, including those dealing with “contemporary” issues such as food and nutrition. The articles covering topics such as traditional fish processing technologies might have more historical context that could be identified on closer reading.

Notes on coding

I took note of the general topics to which I applied each thematic code as I went along. I applied thematic codes based on the research topic and approach followed by the author(s), NOT based on the utility of the resource to our own research in that area. Clearly some areas were not represented at all.

Topic descriptions (my understanding – to discuss!)

No.	Topic	Description
3	Ecology	Resource management, conservation, etc. Perhaps also habitat and biology of fish species used in dried fish production? (Note these resources did not generally surface in queries on “dried fish” or “dry fish”, etc.)
4	Economy	Macroeconomic analysis. National level, or by economic sector.
5	Gender	Publications that are specifically about gender relations. OR about the economic roles of women in fisheries. Some resources provide incidental data on women that would be useful for a gender analysis, which could be retrieved through a full-text search within the Zotero collections.
6	Nutrition and food security	Food safety, contamination, access to nutritious food. See the many subtopics below – some of these might potentially be disaggregated.
7	Policy and governance	Articles that are primarily about governance OR that analyse policy. Just about everything in the item set has a policy applications section.
8	Value chain	Microeconomic analysis. Household-level food preferences and choices; small-scale fish production and trade. Also: Marketing and export?
9	Well-being	Socio-cultural dimensions: labour relations, cultural value, etc.? I tagged a poverty-reduction article here; there are also several texts documenting traditional practices that might be relevant to this topic, though the authors’ analysis doesn’t really seem to focus too much on well-being.

Codes and associated topics from the Indonesia item set.

Code	Relevant topics
4	fish consumption (macro-economic study) – e.g., Belton et al. 2011
4	urban food price policy (and/or 7?) – cf. Jensen & Manrique
4	food consumption patterns – economic analysis
4	marketing dried fish for consumers or for export
5	gender in fisheries (economic and social aspects)
6	insect pests
6	Engineering – experimental processing and storage technology (e.g., to reduce waste and spoilage)
6	bacterial composition (including testing of spoilage)
6	fungi from dried fish
6	measurement of chemical contamination (pesticide residue, mercury, etc.)
6	analysis of yeasts, enzymes, and beneficial bacteria in fermented fish
6	nutritional analysis: protein, mineral content, etc.
6	?? “Scientific” drying to reduce quality loss, and application for dried fish producers (should this be part of “value chain” and/or “policy”?)
6	effect of salt content of dried fish on rodents (rats)
6	study of alternative pesticides (safety and nutrition focus)
6	Techniques for processing under-utilized / trash fish for human consumption (Venugopal)
7	field guides (i.e., non-research) for extension workers, etc.
7	macroeconomic evidence to inform poverty-reduction policies / strategies (could be 4 and 7)
8	description or analysis of processing technologies in different places
8	study of a marketing system (import/export and distribution) for dried fish
8	household-level food preferences (coded as “4”, but could also be “8” or “9”)