Multi-attribute temporal descriptive methods in sensory analysis applied in food science: Protocol for a scoping review

Abstract

Background Sensory perception is a temporal phenomenon highly present in food evaluation. Over the last decades, several sensory analysis methods have been developed to determine how our processing of the stimuli changes during tasting. These methods differ in several parameters: how attributes are characterized (intensity, dominance or applicability), the number of attributes evaluated, the moment of sample characterization (simultaneously with the tasting in continuous or discrete time, retrospectively), the required panel (trained subjects or consumers), etc. At the moment, there is no systematic review encompassing the full scope of this topic. This article presents the protocol for conducting a scoping review on multi-attribute temporal descriptive methods in sensory analysis in food science. Methods The protocol was developed according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) extension for Scoping Reviews checklist. The research question was "how have multi-attribute temporal descriptive methods been implemented, used and compared in sensory analysis?". The eligibility criteria were defined using the PICOS (Population, Intervention, Comparator, Outcome, Study design) framework. This protocol details how the articles of the final review will be retrieved, selected and analyzed. The search will be based on the querying of two academic research databases (Scopus and Web of Science). The main topics reported in research involving sensory analyses methods will be identified and summarized in a data extraction form. This form (detailed in the protocol) will be used to report pertinent information regarding the objectives of the review. It could also be reused as a guideline for carrying out and reporting results of future research in a more standardized way. A quality appraisal process was derived from literature. It will be applied on the included articles of the review, and could also be re-used to ensure that future publications meet higher quality levels. Finally, for the sake of transparency, the limitations of the protocol are discussed.

Multi‐attribute temporal descriptive methods in sensory analysis applied in food science: A systematic scoping review

“…This scoping review was conducted according to the PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA‐ScR, Tricco et al., 2018). It was registered, reviewed, and published in PLoS ONE (Visalli & Galmarini, 2022). Hereafter is a summary of the original reviewed and published protocol (Figure 1).…”

“…The main criteria for inclusion were research articles, available in Web of Science and/or Scopus, referencing multi‐attribute temporal descriptive sensory evaluation methods, related to the evaluation of food and beverages (nonfoods were considered out of scope) or to methodological/data analysis issues. Further details and research equations can be found in Visalli and Galmarini (2022).…”

“…As noticed in section 3.3.1, when sensory evaluation is a secondary measurement and the author does not have expertise in the field of sensory science or data analysis, appropriate coauthors should be associated to the research work. To help researchers to report their works and reviewers to evaluate the completion of submitted articles, we propose a checklist derived from the criteria used to evaluate the articles in this review (Visalli & Galmarini, 2022). This checklist (Visallli & Galmarini, 2023) is versioned and can be downloaded on a public repository from this URL: https://doi.org/10.57745/JUJRTJ.…”

“…To date, only narrative reviews have been carried out on temporal sensory evaluation methods (Cliff & Heymann, 1993; Devezeaux de Lavergne et al., 2017; Di Monaco, Su et al., 2014; Dijksterhuis & Piggott, 2000; Fiszman & Tarrega, 2018; Foster et al., 2011; Keefer et al., 2023; Schlich, 2017), particularly on those focused on product description using more than one attribute (multi‐attribute descriptive methods). Unlike narrative reviews, systematic scoping reviews are structured based on a rigorous methodology (Visalli & Galmarini, 2022) and include a risk of bias assessment, which makes the results transparent, reproducible, and objective.…”

From Molecular Dynamics to Taste Sensory Perception: A Comprehensive Study on the Interaction of Umami Peptides with the T1R1/T1R3-VFT Receptor

“…31 This method provides a more comprehensive insight compared to traditional static sensory evaluations, capturing the entire sensory experience from the initial perception to the aftertaste. 32 From the TI sensory evaluation experiment, the umami perception intensity for each umami peptide and the 0.3% MSG solution was obtained every second within 100 s. By averaging the sensory data from the 10 panelists, the TI curves for each umami peptide and the 0.3% MSG solution were derived, as shown in Figure 4.…”