The air transport research society world conference: A data science-based literature review on the years 2014–2024

The Air Transport Research Society (ATRS) World Conference is one of the major venues for air transport research. The conference covers a wide range of research talks, practice/industrial sessions, and research workshop activities. In this paper, we perform a data-driven analysis of the research abstracts that have been accepted and presented at the conference since 2014. We have grouped the abstracts from the ten annual conferences using t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding to map high-dimensional keyword vectors into a two-dimensional plane for clustering, analysis, and visualization. The major focus of our study concerns three directions. First, we provide a formal description of the actual research presented at the ATRS World Conference series by using methods from natural language processing and machine learning, leading to a data-driven classification consisting of 35 major subject categories. Second, we analyze the origin of main authors/presenters and their background, including their institutions and countries of origin. Third, we perform a network-driven analysis of co-authorships across abstracts to identify the role and importance of key researchers in the community. Finally, we provide an analysis of popular research topics indicated by authors when submitting their abstracts, and a set of major recommendations for future work, based on the insights obtained from our study.