A bibliometric review on marine economy: Current status, development and future directions

The growth and management of the marine economy have received significant attention since the United Nations launched the "Our Ocean, Our Future: Call for Action" initiative. However, a lack of systematic review in the field of the marine economy has hindered progress. This study aims to address this issue by offering a unified knowledge analysis framework with bibliometric technology. We comprehensively analyze 6002 records from the Web of Science using software such as CiteSpace, VOSviewer, and ArcGIS for visualization analysis. This paper has drawn some interesting findings. Firstly, the development of the marine economy has experienced three stages: enlightenment, foundation and rapid growth, with the development process showing more and more apparent geographical cluster characteristics. Secondly, "Sustainable development", "Marine climate change", "Marine ecosystems government" and "Comprehensive performance evaluation" are identified as the mature clusters; meanwhile, "Sea level change", "Marine pollution treatment" and "Sustainable energy exploitation" are potential forefront clusters in marine economy. Based on this, the evolution of knowledge structure about marine economy is found, which changed from discussing the utilization of elements to studying the relationship between them to perform collaborative governance. Finally, this paper concluded by identifying research frontiers and future directions for further study, which includes the development of emerging industries, integration of marine and regional economy, protection of marine ecological and so on. This study can help researchers, policymakers and other participants better understand the knowledge structure and research frontiers of marine economy, and discover the future directions.