Bibliometric corpus of research on Theobroma cacao, 1662–2026: local citation network, RPYS, main paths and citable core

Data and code supporting the historical review 'From chocolate treatises to cacao genomics: 360 years of research on Theobroma cacao, with postharvest quality as the guiding thread' (submitted to Food Research International). The deposit contains identifiers, DOIs, publication years, periods, thematic flags and local citation counts for 42,421 unique records (titles only from open Crossref metadata; no abstracts); the local citation network (96,747 links) built from Crossref reference lists; the reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS) series; the global and thematic key-route main paths; the thematic profile by period; the quantitative test of the periodisation; the citable core of 90 works; the analysis scripts; and the figures of the article.