Bibliometric analysis and knowledge mapping of greenhouse gas emissions in ports: a review

Globally, the freight transport sector is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Within international supply chains, seaports play a crucial role. The aim of this research is to analyse how the scientific literature addresses the issue of greenhouse gas emissions in ports. With the application of the software VOSviewer, bibliometric analysis and knowledge mapping will be used to investigate the research sectors studying polluting emissions in ports. The aim is to identify and define clusters associated with the most frequently used keywords. Literature reviews typically begin with a limited set of keywords, which can constrain the scope and allow for personal bias. Several researchers have conducted literature reviews, but they have typically focused on only one specific aspect. Data was collected from the Scopus database, focusing on English language publications that addressed the following topic: greenhouse gas emissions at seaports. Two categories of terms were selected. The first category was related to greenhouse gas emissions. It included terms such as “emission(s)”, “GHG” and “greenhouse gas”. The second category was referred to the localization area, i.e. seaports, and included terms such as “port(s)” and “seaport(s)”. The search was conducted for the terms in the title, abstract, and keywords, restricted to only articles published in journals, resulting in 1,556 documents, between 2009 and March 2024. The documents were subjected to a preliminary evaluation by reading the title and the abstract and based on the co-occurrence of the most frequently used keywords, five clusters were identified using the VOSviewer software. The work will be presented as follows. Section 2 will be dedicated to the literature review, which will address the literature on port emissions. Section 3 will provide information about the data collection. The Sect. 4 will focus on the methodology used, while Sect. 5 will illustrate the main results. Finally, the last chapter will summarise the work and present some proposals for further research.