Mapping the intellectual landscape of maritime defense technology: A bibliometric analysis of Scopus-Indexed publications (2000–2025)

Maritime defense technology has emerged over the past two decades as a strategically consequential but conceptually fragmented research domain, intersecting naval architecture, marine engineering, defense studies, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and international security. This article maps the intellectual landscape of the field through a bibliometric analysis of Scopus-indexed publications from January 2000 to December 2025. Following the Scientific Procedures and Rationales for Systematic Literature Reviews (SPAR-4-SLR) protocol, a structured search retrieved 1,847 documents that were screened and refined to a final corpus of 1,213 articles, conference papers, and reviews. Performance analysis was conducted using the Biblioshiny interface of the Bibliometrix R-package, and science mapping (co-authorship, co-occurrence, and bibliographic coupling) was performed in VOSviewer. The results reveal three principal findings. First, annual publication output grew from a baseline of fewer than 20 documents per year in the early 2000s to an estimated 178 documents in 2025, with an inflection point in 2018 corresponding to the convergence of artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and grey-zone maritime competition. Second, the intellectual structure of the field is organized around five thematic clusters: (a) unmanned and autonomous maritime systems, (b) maritime cybersecurity, (c) naval architecture and combat platforms, (d) maritime domain awareness and surveillance, and (e) defense industrial base and technology transfer. Third, geographic and institutional concentration remains pronounced, with the United States, the People's Republic of China, the United Kingdom, Norway, and South Korea collectively accounting for more than 60% of total publication output, while emerging contributors including India, Türkiye, and Indonesia exhibit accelerating output. The article concludes with implications for scholars, defense planners, and industrial stakeholders, and proposes a research agenda emphasizing comparative case studies in archipelagic states, the integration of AI ethics with autonomous maritime weapons, and the political-economy of defense industrial base development in middle-power navies.