Maritime pilotage in transition: mapping the current research landscape

Maritime pilotage faces key challenges, including occupational and navigational risks, workforce shortages, and the need to adapt to rapid technological changes. Although research has increased in response to these challenges and broader shipping safety concerns, the extent to which various aspects have been addressed remains unclear. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the research landscape on maritime pilotage. The aim is to synthesize research areas, examine trends in key areas with a particular focus on risk and safety studies and analysis techniques, and identify future directions. This is achieved through a bibliometric analysis and a systematic literature review integrating two major databases: Web of Science and Scopus. The important findings include a strong focus in the maritime pilotage literature on human factors, pilots’ occupational health, and safety risks; the development of multifaceted technology-based innovations and emerging research areas such as remote pilotage and environmental sustainability; and an increasing trend in integrating probabilistic models with Human Reliability Analysis tools and systemic analysis approaches in maritime pilotage risk and safety analysis. Furthermore, four future directions for maritime pilotage research are proposed, including spatial and temporal risk analysis, risk assessment of remote pilotage, maritime pilotage sustainability, and empirical analysis and database integration.