Across the waves: a bibliometric analysis of container shipping research since the 1960s

ABSTRACT

The paper investigates collaborative and semantic patterns that emerged between 1967 and 2013 about the theme of container shipping based on a corpus of 294 articles published in scholarly journals within the fields of transportation, supply chain, economics, geography, regional planning and development, and operations research. An analysis based on the co-occurrence of title words allows identifying dominant sub-themes and their evolution. Main results point to the gradual diversification of container shipping research, from the dominance of economics towards a more trans-disciplinary set of approaches which integrate port-related activities and multimodal networks. Yet, disciplinary specialization remains strong up to nowadays so that container shipping research remains rather fragmented. While co-authorships have increased over time, they remain polarized by few, weakly connected research battalions. Our study suggests that research on container shipping would benefit from more frequent contacts between such communities to foster in-depth cross-disciplinary studies and fundamental cooperation.

KEYWORDS:

• Co-occurrence network
• collaboration network
• container shipping
• research trends
• semantics analysis

Acknowledgements

This study has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme [(FP/2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement Number 313847] ‘World Seastemsʼ and the Transport Institute of the University of Manitoba.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. http://tulip.labri.fr/TulipDrupal/.

2. The categorization reflects the research topics and discipline classifications as identified in Lau et al. (2013). It is possible to include more subcategories in the analysis. However, this may not necessarily generate more insights as the definition of more numerous semantic areas often leads to complex patterns that are difficult to interpret.

3. We have calculated that the average number of characters increased over the periods from 57 to 70 and 77, which is a good indicator of the growth in length of article titles, all words included. However, considering only the selected words, it has increased more smoothly from 27 to 28 and 35 on average. The average number of selected words has grown from 2.54 to 2.65 and 3.28. This is not a new trend, as already in the 1970s, scholars observed the increase in the number of substantive title words in many scientific fields and across different languages (Buxton and Meadows 1977). However, this tends to complicate the analysis of co-occurrences due to the equivalent increase in the number of words, expressions, and links between them.

4. We note that in the University of California at Berkeley, PhD students in the civil engineering program are allowed to pursue Master’s Degree in economics and finance. In many other universities, business schools recruit research students with backgrounds in engineering and mathematics.

Additional information

Funding

This study has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme [(FP/2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement Number 313847] ‘World Seastemsʼ and the Transport Institute of the University of Manitoba.