Global research trends in the blue economy: a bibliometric review and future research agenda

The Blue Economy framework has been on the rise in promoting sustainability for economic development while preserving coastal and marine ecosystems. Regardless of the mounting academic research done, the broader study and thematic directions of Blue Economy are incoherent. The objective of this study is to map out the trends in publication, prevailing research themes and key contributors in Blue Economy using bibliometric analysis. Scopus databases were used to retrieve bibliometric data by using “blue economy” as keyword with English-language documents chosen to identify preferred documents. VOSviewer was used to analyse all 2,346 documents. This study has used descriptive analysis to examine the trend in publication and key contributors while to identify the thematic structure, the “co-occurrence” keyword analysis was employed. From the result, it implicates a steady development over the years in Blue Economy publication, indicating scholarly attention to the area. Four major thematic clusters emerge after analysing using co-occurrence keywords: ecosystems and environmental management, governance and sustainability, fisheries and aquaculture, marine renewable energy and ocean-based technologies as well as marine resource utilisation. Although this features the diverse discipline across Blue Economy, the results also indicate that integration across governance, environmental, technological, and livelihood-focused areas is limited. In general, this paper has offered a systematic review of the current state of Blue Economy research literature and has offered insights to aid further research and policy models on more comprehensive and inclusive marine development pathways.