Bibliometric Analysis of Research on Green Shipping Practices

The paper is to explore a bibliometric approach to quantitatively assessing current research trends on the idea of green shipping issues. The paper is especially looking for content, structure and connections between research on shipping and sustainability matters. The aim of the paper is to identify dominant subfields from green shipping practices research field and find out how they are connected with each other. The bibliometric tools are used-trend analysis as well as mapping and clustering of keywords. The findings show that the papers covering green shipping area can be divided into six clusters. The most important subfields focus on regulations imposed by International Maritime Organisation, new technologies (mainly connected with ship power) as well as productivity and outcome of shipping companies. Green shipping can be regarded as an umbrella which covers all processes from a ship lifetime-shipbuilding, environmentally friendly operations and sustainable ship recycling.