Research trends in Belt and Road Initiative studies on logistics, supply chains, and transportation sector

ABSTRACT

Since its inception in 2013, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has become a focal issue in international transportation and global logistics because infrastructure development and economic and transport corridors have been influencing connectivity among countries along the Belt and Road. This paper aims to conduct a literature review on logistics, supply chains, and transport (LST) field in the context of the BRI since 2013. The papers for the literature review were collected from SCI/SSCI/SCIE and Chinese SSCI journals. This paper applies Text Mining to draw key research topics and research networks of the literature and then makes a comparative study between selected 190 English and 198 Chinese papers published in 2013–2020. This paper also investigates and compares the methods applied to those papers. The findings help researchers understand research trends in the LST field and contribute to highlighting research insights for further studies in the LST field.

KEYWORDS:

• Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)
• Maritime Silk Road
• literature review
• infrastructure investment
• container shipping
• text mining

Acknowledgements

The authors of this paper acknowledges the research fund from the Foundation of Korea Logistics Industry Promotion. The authors would also like to thank the support by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51909202, 72072097).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).