Road transport development : a bibliometric analysis of scientific discourse

Abstract

PURPOSE: The aim of the research resulting in this article is to identify the stages of evolution of the concept of transport, as well as to forecast further developments in this area of science. On this basis, a network of co-cited key words in the field of road transport was developed.

DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: A bibliometric analysis of the literature on road transport was carried out. The data source was the international interdisciplinary database Scopus. The time span of the analysis was 2000-2022. A co-occurrence network analysis of road transport keywords was performed using VOSviewer version 1.6.19.

FINDINGS: The results obtained are related to the extraction of cognitive knowledge about the preferred directions of development of the analysed category - road transport. Based on the analysis, the evolution of the number of published works on road transport between 2000 and 2022 and the countries with the highest number of publications in the area under study are presented. In addition, a co-occurrence network of road transport keywords was constructed using the VosViewer tool.

PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: The results developed will be used to identify effective pathways and research gaps for the road transport category. The identification of sources with the highest productivity and citations can be used by potential publication authors to adopt an appropriate publishing strategy.

ORIGINALITY/VALUE: There are now many publications that preface the bibliometric analysis of the road transport literature. This article provides an up-to-date, comprehensive analysis of this field and enriches the understanding of its existing patterns and trends.