The Blue Connection. A Systematic and Critical Review of Shipping Network Research

Abstract Despite its early development by geographers, research on shipping networks long remained a narrow confine of academia. Since the late 2000s, however, this subfield is experiencing rapid growth, fueled by increased shipping data availability, computational power, renewed graph-theoretical methods, and a growing recognition that maritime connectivity matters for trade and socio-economic development. This research provides a bibliometric analysis of more than 300 peer-reviewed articles 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 coauthorships. Second, we use a natural language processing (NLP) approach, namely the structural topic model, to identify four main topics: trade and connectivity; hubs and centrality; vulnerability and robustness; and communities and spatial structure. Three emerging subthemes are identified, including environmental impacts, urban and regional development, and the strategies of shipping firms and alliances.