The bibliometric analysis and visualization mapping of research on maritime accidents

The purpose of the study was to assess the output of research on maritime accidents and citations from 2000 to 2022 through a bibliometric analysis. Utilizing the visualization and mapping program VOSviewer 1.6.18, the relevant data was extracted from the Web of Science (WoS) database and analyzed. The findings indicated important study fields, country contributions, productive journals, as well as the most cited authors’ articles. The primary findings were as follows: The most influential journal was Safety Science. One of the most common topics of study for maritime accidents was the human factor. The most productive country was the People’s Republic of China. The findings of the study can assist researchers in conducting their studies more effectively by providing information about the journals they may use, the authors who contributed to it, current research trends, countries, and keywords.


Introduction
Since the beginning of shipping, maritime accidents, which is unwanted anomalous occurrences aboard a ship that frequently cause fatalities, serious injuries, and different sorts of property damage, have been a significant problem for the global maritime community (Luo & Shin, 2019). Marine accidents constantly happen, causing significant harm to both people and the environment, despite ongoing advancements in maritime a new approach by analyzing grounding and collision incidents and integrating the Technique for the Retrospective and predictive Analysis of Cognitive Errors (TRACEr) with the accident analysis technique of CASMET. A statistical analysis of AIS data and marine accident data from Norwegian waters was also carried out by Bye & Aalberg (2018) to determine the factors that led to collision and grounding accidents. In collision and contact accidents on passenger ships, human factor analysis has been carried out by Uğurlu et al. (2018).
Whereas numerous studies have highlighted the significance of human and organizational factors in marine accidents (Hetherington et al., 2006;Schröder-Hinrichs, 2010;Chen et al., 2013;Qiao et al., 2020), others focus on risk analysis (Awal & Hasegawa, 2017;Fan et al., 2020aFan et al., , 2020bKulkarni et al., 2020). There are also studies utilizing methods like root cause analysis, HFACS and Bayesian networks (Hänninen & Kujala, 2012;Montewka et al., 2014;Kum & Sahin, 2015;Kececi & Arslan, 2017;Akyuz, 2017;Batalden & Sydnes, 2014;Soner et al., 2015;Yıldırım et al., 2019). Hetherington et al. (2006) carried out a literature review on the topic of ship safety, focusing on three key areas: common accident causes, human error, and efforts to improve maritime security. Fatigue, stress, health, situational awareness, teamwork, decision making, communication, automation, and the prevalence of a culture of safety were all factors in their analysis. In their research, Chen et al. (2013) also proposed a Human and Organizational Factors (HOFs) framework for the investigation and analysis of maritime accidents. But Qiao et al. (2020) claims that because there is a paucity of data concerning human factors in the shipping industry, evaluating the role of human factors in maritime accidents is challenging.
According to Kulkarni et al. (2020) (2017) proposed a new taxonomy in their study that incorporates root cause taxonomies that have been applied up to now in the examination of maritime accidents (Kołakowski et al., 2022).
There have been several studies on various accident types using a variety of methodologies in a number of different countries, so research is required to better comprehend the arrangement of information on maritime accidents. Therefore, this study attempts to improve the contribution of all previous studies by conducting a bibliometric analysis of the maritime accident literature.
It has been noted that bibliometric analysis studies are conducted in the maritime industry on various subjects (Mao et al., 2010;Lau et al., 2017;Munim et al., 2020;Meyers et al., 2021;Bolbot et al., 2022;Büber & Köseoğlu, 2022;Kołakowski et al., 2022). Utilizing bibliometric analysis, Mao et al. (2010) have analyzed the global scientific output of risk assessment research over the previous sixteen years and provided insight into the study's characteristics and trends. Lau et al. (2017)  Although significant bibliometric analysis studies have been conducted in diverse fields, there are few bibliometric analyses focused on marine accidents (Kulkarni et al., 2020;Gil et al., 2020;Dominguez-Péry et al., 2021;Fu et al., 2021;Wróbel, 2021). A bibliometric study of risk management studies with a focus on the Baltic Sea region has been presented by Kulkarni et al. (2020) bibliometric study appears to be necessary. We believe that our research will fulfill this gap in the literature.
The structure of this paper is as follows: The second section describes the study's methodology and provides a concise explanation of bibliometric analysis. The third section gives the results of a bibliometric study of papers on marine accidents and displays the many viewpoints on network structure based on bibliographic matching, citation, and keyword concurrence.
The fourth section discusses the outcomes and provides information for future studies.

Materials and Methods
Bibliometric analysis is a method of document analysis technique that involves of bibliometric theory to examine related material using mathematical and statistical techniques (Zou et al., 2018). Bibliometric techniques are being utilized more often to research various scientific topics and to evaluate institutions and universities globally (Ellegaard & Wallin, 2015). By understanding the meaning of massive amounts of unstructured data in a systematic manner, bibliometric analysis is valuable for unraveling and charting the cumulative scientific knowledge and evolutionary subtleties of established domains (Donthu et al., 2021). By examining the production of publications, keywords, authors, institutes, and nations, bibliometric approaches offer a means to pinpoint development patterns or future research directions (Chen et al., 2016;Li et al., 2015). Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, Science Direct, and Google Scholar are just a handful of the academic databases and search engines that are readily available, and they all make it much easier to find and retrieve scientific papers for bibliometric research (Wong et al., 2020). The world's most popular platform for searching and analyzing scientific citations is the Web of Science (WoS), and it is utilized as a research tool to support a wide range of scientific activities across many knowledge areas as well as a dataset for extensive investigations involving massive amounts of data (Li et al., 2018). Consequently, bibliometric analysis was performed with the data obtained from the WoS database in this study.
This article describes the outcomes of bibliometric analysis and visualization of a variety of scholarly works. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to identify the global research trends for the terms "maritime accident* or marine accident*" as well as the most productive authors and publications. This study makes a methodological contribution to the field of maritime accident by presenting a bibliometric mapping that allows for the evaluation of scientific presentation as well as its visual analytics using five bibliometric mapping techniques (co- The bibliometric analysis in this study was carried out using the VOSviewer (version 1.6.18) software. The software VOSviewer enables the creation and visualization of bibliometric maps (Md Khudzari et al., 2018).
The objectives of this study are to: 1) provide a thorough overview of the evolution of research on maritime accidents; 2) identify the distribution of the most productive journals and contributing countries; 3) identify the most common relevant keywords; and 4) identify the authors who have contributed the most. Table 1 displays the top 10 articles by search query that were cited the most throughout the specified duration, with Chauvin et al.'s (2013) article leading the list with 287 total citations. The significance of bridge resource management for pilot-on-board navigation in restricted waterways is the focus of this mostcited paper. In the article, collision accidents were examined and HFACS was used as a method. It can be seen that the most cited article was published in the Accident Analysis and Prevention journal, which has Q1 as its category quartile and Elsevier as its publisher.  (see table 1) with 213 citations. According to their study, a number of stakeholders, including regulatory agencies, must take additional measures for the AIS to achieve its stated aims and objectives. The paper, co-authored by Pentti Kujala, is ranked third among the top 10 most cited articles (see Table   1) and focuses on creating a systematic and proactive framework for assessing risk. Their study has produced a comprehensive model of risk for the marine transportation system.  The study shows that, even though there have been more ship accidents in general over the past ten years, the safety level of different types of ships has not changed much, and neither has the average severity of their effects.

Results
To evaluate the safety of all fundamental categories of merchant ships in terms of accidents' occurrence, initial frequencies, and fundamental outcomes. To quantify the risk level of the operating world fleet by statistical analysis of historical data.

Formal Safety Assessment
Maritime The distribution of publications on maritime accidents by country is shown in Figure 3.  By conducting research on high-quality journals, academics may have a deeper understanding of the academic preferences of each journal on the topic of maritime accidents, allowing them to be more selective when subscribing to journals and submitting papers. As a result, as seen in Figure 4, we ranked the top 10 journals whose papers on maritime accidents have received the most citations. The number of articles in a total of 186 journals that are focused on at least three publications was examined. The most influential journals, as seen in Figure 4, are Safety Science, Ocean Engineering, and Accident Analysis and Prevention.
A network map of keywords based on searching query on "maritime accident", "marine accident" literature was drawn in

Discussion and Conclusion
In this study, which analyzes search queries on (maritime accident* or marine accident*), some significant worldwide  for the search terms "maritime accident* or marine accident*" as well as the most productive authors and publications. This study makes a methodological contribution to the field of maritime accident by presenting a bibliometric mapping that allows for the evaluation of scientific presentation as well as its visual analytics using five bibliometric mapping techniques (cooccurrence keyword analysis, abstract keyword analysis, author citations analysis, citation country analysis, and citation source analysis). This allows for a better understanding of the field's structure and evolution.
We discovered that the most influential publication was Safety Science. The country with the highest level of production was the People's Republic of China. We found that the most frequently used keywords are maritime accident, maritime safety, and marine accident. We concluded that the Bayesian network is one of the popular methods in studies on maritime accidents, risk assessments connected to accidents are conducted, human factor studies related to marine accidents are prominent, AIS data is used in research, and the Istanbul Strait is one of the important regions for accident studies.
The following contributions were made by this study: it provided a thorough overview of the evolution of research on maritime accidents, and as a result, prominent approaches in maritime accident studies were identified. The distribution of the most productive journals as well as the most cited authors in research on marine accidents were identified. It has been determined which countries around the world have conducted extensive research on the subject.
Since we only examined English-language publications from a certain time period, the consistency of our findings depended on the search terms we selected. These are the limitations of our study. In the future, the contribution of articles written in languages other than English and those published over a wider period of time can be analyzed.
Choosing "article" as the only document type is one of the limitations of this study. In future research, the study could be expanded by including additional document types.
Furthermore, while the data for the present study were taken from WoS, future research can utilize a variety of bibliometric techniques and additional databases as well. The current study is also limited to using a single database.