A Data-Driven Review of News Media on Blockchain and Internet of Things in Agricultural Contexts

To overcome the challenges faced by modern agriculture, researchers have turned towards technological advancements, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), and blockchain technology (BT). This study aims to evaluate the discourse involving the themes of IoT and BT in agriculture through a comparative analysis between the discourses of academic papers and news articles identified in Web of Science (WoS) and Google News, respectively. A topic modeling approach using latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) was adopted to analyse the data. The results indicate that academic papers and news articles have shared a discourse related to BT in the food supply chain, IoT sensors, and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies being applied in agricultural practices. The differences between the discourses mainly lie in their focus on farmers and the internet, which attracted notice in news articles but did not garner equal attention in academic literature. Based on the findings, recommendations for future research are proposed.