Shipping Network Research: A Systematic and Quantitative Review

Once developed by geographers, shipping network research has long remained a peripheral subfield of academia. Increased shipping data availability and computational power, combined with renewed graph-theoretical methods, caused an unprecedented growth of shipping network studies since the late 2000s. This article provides an in-depth bibliometric analysis of no less than 329 peer-reviewed papers published between 2007 and 2025. First, it describes the gathered corpus from diverse angles, such as the growth of papers, the main journals, its disciplinary background, and the pattern of co-authorships. Second, we use a natural language processing (NLP) approach, namely the structural topic model, to undertake an in-depth analysis based on the contents of abstracts. We identify four main topics, of which trade and connectivity; hubs and centrality; vulnerability and robustness; and communities and spatial structure, which are discussed according to their innovative character compared with wider research on ports, maritime transport, and network science. Three additional subgroups received peripheral attention despite their core importance: environmental issues (of which, marine bioinvasions), socio-economic development, and the role of shipping alliances. We conclude that network science methods still have important potential in shipping network port and maritime studies, and propose several pathways for further research.