Year: 2025
Type: article
Study design: Systematic Review
Abstract: Despite its early development by geographers, research on shipping networks long remained a narrow confine of academia. Since the late 2000s, however, this subfield is experiencing rapid growth, fueled by increased shipping data availability, computational power, renewed graph-theoretical methods, and a growing recognition that maritime connectivity matters for trade and socio-economic development. This research provides a bibliometric analysis of more than 300 peer-reviewed articles published between 2007 and 2025. First, it describes the gathered corpus from diverse angles, such as the growth of papers, the main journals, its disciplinary background, and the pattern of coauthorships. Second, we use a natural language processing (NLP) approach, namely the structural topic model, to identify four main topics: trade and connectivity; hubs and centrality; vulnerability and robustness; and communities and spatial structure. Three emerging subthemes are identified, including environmental impacts, urban and regional development, and the strategies of shipping firms and alliances.
Source: Networks and Spatial Economics
Authors: Marc-Antoine Faure, César Ducruet
Language: English
Topic: Maritime Ports and Logistics
Subfield: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,090
Funder: Agence Nationale de la Recherche
OpenAlex ID: W4414562895