A Bibliometric Analysis of Research Trends in Goods Transportation Using the Scopus Database

Abstract

In our study, we applied bibliometric analysis techniques to explore the research trends in goods transportation. The Scopus database is selected for our research works. Since the extracted datasets from the Scopus database are effectively useful for bibliometric and descriptive analysis using VOSVIEWER software and MS-EXCEL. This study used six research contributions to find out descriptive statistics such as year—wise publications trend, document type, publisher contribution summary, percentage of articles vs subject category, the contribution of authors and their countries based on the total number of publications and their corresponding total citations, the reputation of documents and journals according to the total citations that occurred over the period by performing citation analysis, the intellectual structures of goods transportation by performing co-citation analysis with co-cited authors, to identify the trends involving goods transportation by performing keywords co-occurrence analysis, and to know the research gaps and further research directions on goods transportation. This research study has found gradual results of goods transportation from 2000 to 2021 and performed network analysis to get the intellectual structure and emergent themes in goods transportation, such as dangerous goods transportation, railway goods transportation, technology enhancement in goods transportation, and sustainability perspectives. This study was limited to documents that were retrieved from the largest database Scopus. Those which are not incorporated here are not part of the study, which may or may not affect our research findings. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt at the evolution of documents about goods transportation by using bibliometric tools.