Exploration of the state-of-the-art of maritime transport safety research: a bibliometric and visualised analysis

Maritime traffic risk is increasing rapidly with the growth of marine traffic volume and construction of marine facilities, water bridges, port development, marine wind farm, etc. Given this emerging trend, this paper presents a bibliometric analysis and mapping of the broad academic literature related to maritime traffic safety, focusing on the influences of international collaborations and knowledge sources on the developments of this research domain. To identify trends, patterns and the knowledge distribution of the research on maritime traffic safety, the visualisation of similarities (VOS) viewer software, the bibliometric analysis, and scientometric mapping of the literature have been performed from the perspectives of publication and citation distribution over time, leading authors, countries (regions), institutions, the corresponding collaboration networks, most cited publications and references, focused research fields and topics, research trend evolution over time, etc. The paper provides a comprehensive and quantitative overview and significant picture representation of the domain's leading and evolutionary trends by employing specific aforementioned bibliometric analysis factors. In addition, by reviewing the evolutionary trends of the journals and the proposed investigated factors, such as the influential works, main research topics, and the research frontiers, this paper reveals the scientific literature's main research objectives and directions that could be addressed and explored in future studies.