Comparative bibliometric and network analysis of maritime transport/shipping literature using the Web of Science database

Abstract

This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of maritime transport/shipping-related publications between 1975 and November 2018 in order to describe the profile and research themes. Comprehensive queries were used to reveal the general structure of maritime transport/shipping-related literature in the context of the Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCI-Expanded) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) databases. The analysis was conducted using bibliometric mapping. Five years of maritime/shipping literature was also comparatively presented. The results indicated major research areas, leading authors, countries, organizations, journals, and publications with the contributions of the comments of leading authors. Within the five-year period, maritime surveillance research and marine engineering research clusters were identified as developing clusters that expanded and received increased interest. Economic studies decreased, while operations research increased in the maritime transport/shipping literature. Optimization research and marine engineering research appear to be growing research clusters. Interdisciplinary research appears to have a high chance of being published in SCI-Expanded and SSCI in the future. The main contribution of this paper was the identification of areas of current research interests which allowed the quantification and visualization of changes in the entire body of shipping literature over a short time period.