Dealing with the Social-Ecological Obstacle: Review of Decision-Making Approaches in Marine Management

Abstract

Occupying the same crucial position as land resources, ecological resources originate from the marine system nourish various aspects of human welfare and the world economy. It is significant to apply efficient decision-making approaches, which assist with the achievements of sustainable development and environmental protection. This paper aims to review decision-making approaches in marine management and present a comprehensive bibliometric study. To achieve this goal, bibliometric analysis is used to analyze the current status and emerging trends in this field, including the cluster network, the collaboration network, and burst detection. The results show that the number of publications in this field has increased rapidly, and it has become an increasing interdisciplinary research subject. Besides, marine conservation is the largest clusterand the USA is the most productive country in marine management research and the marine policy and NOAA are the most productive journal and institution, respectively. Furthermore, “Diversity,” “Management,” and “Population” are the most influential keywords, and “People” and “Public participation” are the emerging trends in decision-making and marine management. Our work clarifies where we are now in terms of marine management and decision-making and how do they serve each other to achieve sustainable development. More importantly, some deep insights could be given that motivate researchers to learn the connections and collaborations between natural science and social study, which is our effort to deal with the social-ecological obstacle as well.

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

1. Introduction

Ecological resources that originate from the marine system nourish various aspects of human welfare and the world economy such as fishery industry, salt manufacturing, marine petrochemical, deep-sea mining, ocean engineering, and marine pharmaceuticals. In recent decades, the intensity and frequency of marine resource utilization have been increasing, resulting in more pressures on the highly complex marine ecosystem [1]. There is also an urgent need for efficient management of the marine system to tackle the wasting of resources, marine pollution, and even ecological damage. Efficient marine management could be further utilized in decision-making to assist managers and policymakers with the sustainable development of the global economy and environmental protection. However, knowledge exchanges between marine researchers and decision-makers have become a significant obstacle to benefitting or seeking a balance between the vulnerable marine ecosystem and human activities simultaneously [2]. Removing the obstacle is also what researchers are striving for. To investigate the contributions made by scholars in the marine management and decision-making research areas, this paper review the related studies by using the comprehensive bibliometric analysis. It should be pointed out that our work clarifies where we are now in terms of marine management and decision-making and how do they serve each other to achieve sustainable development. More importantly, some deep insights could be given to motivate researchers to learn the connections and collaborations between marine management and decision-making researches, which is our effort to remove the aforementioned obstacle as well.

Considering the difficulty of knowledge exchanges between scientists and decision-makers, Cvitanovic et al. [2] analyzed the obstacle of knowledge exchange and provided some suggestions to cope with it. While Goldsmith et al. [3] suggested establishing a novel workshop to bridge the gap between scientists and decision-makers. Some recommendations have been proposed that improve collaborations between scientists and decision-makers [4, 5]. Besides, various frameworks have been applied to marine management, which can be seen as another theoretical progress to fill this gap. Discussing and evaluating the effect of specific frameworks in marine management could be helpful for further decision-making. For instance, Atkins et al. [6] and Patrício et al. [7] pointed out that the drivers-pressures-state change-impact-response (DPSIR) framework can be adopted in marine management, especially for risk assessment and risk management. Marre et al. [8] also emphasized the significance of economic valuation of ecosystem services in coastal and marine management decision-making. Note that even though the above frameworks have been widely applied to assess the natural environment or even marine ecosystem, they should be improved to consider diverse components and specific management needs. Similarly, after analyzing the applications of decisions support systems in marine management, Bolman et al. [9] found that this framework is highly overrated. It is concluded that marine management frameworks or models should be aligned with decision-makers’ needs.

Due to the diversity of decision-making purposes and the complexity of the marine management context, some decision-making tools for marine management have been developed. Taking the structured decision-making (SDM) process as an example, it is capable to build the framework for marine management according to the values of stakeholders and managers [10]. As evaluated by Espinosa-Romero et al. [11]; SDM is helpful for decision-makers and meaningful for stakeholders. Furthermore, Yee et al. [12] integrated the DPSIR framework and SDM to identify and assemble a broadly applicable suite of information that improves sustainable coral reef ecosystem services. Besides, regarding the interdependencies of diverse ecological and socio-economic standards, marine spatial planning (MSP) is introduced in related academic research as it could analyze the spatial and temporal distribution of human activities in marine by involving to integrate social, economic, and environmental objectives [13, 14]. Based on the MSP process, Kyriazi [15] analyzed decision support tools to deal with marine conflicts and found their shortcoming in terms of providing a final solution that can be accepted by all participants involved. Janßen et al. [16] investigated decision support tools as well. By knowing 59 MSP practitioners about their experience with some well-known decision support tools, they revealed that decision support tools are more suitably used in academic research, instead of everyday MSP practice. Therefore, a higher degree of knowledge and function integration is required for the future development of decision support tools. In addition, there are also many decision-making practices in marine management such as dealing with oil spill contingency [17, 18], fishery management planning [19–22], marine zoning decisions [23, 24], and nature conservation [25–27]. Obviously, different decision-making tools are used, developed and integrated for marine management goals.

Based on the foregoing, many decision-making tools have been proved to be efficient in certain marine management backgrounds, while the effectiveness of some frameworks or models still has been questioned. As a result, researchers provided numerous reviews in regard to the applications of decision-making approaches in marine management such as spatial models [28], cumulative impact assessment [29, 30], ecological, intelligent computational techniques [31], and constraint mapping [32]. However, as aforementioned, it is difficult for one decision-making approach to cope with complex marine management issues. Therefore, integrated methods and their implementations are also reviewed [33, 34]. Even though many scholars have made different analyses of the application of decision-making in marine management, few studies could be found to analyze the current status and emerging trends in this research by the visual analysis of literature.

Visual analysis of literature can also be called the mapping knowledge domain, which involves the process of mining, analyzing, organizing, mapping, and displaying knowledge to analyze the topics who are interested. CiteSpace, Ucinet, and VOSviewer are the most widely used visualization tools, of which CiteSpace is the most widely used. CiteSpace was proposed by Chen [35], and it is a quantitative analysis tool based on a mapping software of scientific knowledge, which can vividly display the current status and the emerging trends of bibliometrics research. Compared with other tools, CiteSpace has many unique advantages. For instance, CiteSpace can perform multiple and dynamic visualization analyses of citations, display the evolution process of a knowledge field, and automatically identify the research frontiers represented by citation node literature and co-citation clustering. Besides, the time slice is also a useful tool provided by CiteSpace to show a temporal perspective and present the citation bursts [36]. CiteSpace has been widely used in recent years because it enables scholars to comprehensively analyze specific research fields through citation, co-citation, and geographical distribution, such as in the field of big data research [37, 38], decision-making [39, 40], blockchain [41, 42], and supply chain [43, 44].

Therefore, the arrival of CiteSpace has inspired scholars in various fields, telling them that there are still some new areas to explore. We find that three are few studies that use bibliometrics to study the application of decision-making in marine management. Therefore, this paper uses CiteSpace to analyze the current status and emerging trends about the application of decision-making in marine management, including co-citation analysis of authors, institutions, countries, and journals, as well as burst detection of keywords and references to further analyze the emerging trends and hotspots in this research. Thus, this study aims to provide a more objective and comprehensive econometric analysis of the literature about decision-making in marine management research through the use of the software CiteSpace. Based on the following aspects, 1830 published literature retrieved from Web of Science (WoS) were analyzed in this paper. (1) Cluster network analysis of decision-making in marine management; (2) state the countries/regions, journals, authors, and institutions that have made significant contributions; and (3) burst detection analysis of keywords and references of decision-making in marine management. Based on this, the structure of this paper is mainly as follows. Section 1 introduces the background of this paper, and Section 2 explains the data and methods. Section 3 focuses on the cluster network analysis of citations, and Section 4 analyses the collaborative analysis of countries/regions, journals, institutions, and authors. Section 5 describes the current status and emerging trends by burst detection techniques, and Section 6 summarizes the whole paper.

2. Basic Preparation

2.1. Preliminary Requirements

Two reasons are considered in this study to choose the database for the bibliometric analysis on the decision-making in marine management. First, we choose the web of science (WoS) as the data source because it is a professional platform that provides readers and researchers with comprehensive information about academic journals, books, articles, and proceedings in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. Thus, it is very suitable and widely used to do the bibliometric analysis, which is also the main reason that we select it in this bibliometric study. Note that only two key databases, the Science Citation Index (SCI) and the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), are selected and studied in this paper. Second, by searching the keywords “decision-making” and “marine management” in the title and abstract, we get 1830 related articles published between 1990 and 2021. It is enough to do the bibliometric analysis for all the software tools such as Citespace and Pajek. Also, the derived results can further prove these conclusions.

The results of the literature analysis that comes with WoS provide us with some general information about the state of research in decision-making and marine management. Figure 1 shows the trend change in the number of published papers on this topic from 1990 to 2021. It is obvious that the number of publications has generally been increasing during the research period. The number of publications is relatively stable during the early 1990–2003 period and begins to increase in phases after 2003. Starting in 2003, the number of publications jumped every 2–4 years, growing from an initial 21 publications to 219 in 2021, a roughly 10-fold increase in number. It should be noted that at the time of writing this paper does not collect all the publications from 2021 due to time constraints, but this does not affect the overall trend of growth in the literature amount.

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Furthermore, according to the categories of WoS literature, the literature records in this field can be divided into different research angles in more detail. Figure 2 shows the categories of WoS literature in this field. “Environmental science” is the most prominent research category. Bennett [45] provided a more complete perspective for environmental management and decision-making from the perspectives of adaptive protection and verification protection. Subsequently, unlike the former, “environmental research” focuses more on the analysis of environmental issues using methods. Douvere [46] believed that the development of marine spatial planning (MSP) and marine zoning is the key to achieving ecosystem-based marine management. In next step, the article focuses on the importance of the method, its actual use and achievements, and emphasizes that the MSP method is valued in policy management and decision-making at all levels in most countries. As well as more research categories such as the following “Marine freshwater organisms,” “Oceanography,” and “Ecology,” etc., focus on different research perspectives to elaborate on marine management and decision-making related content. On the other hand, Table 1 shows the research issues in the field of decision-making and marine management discussed from the perspective of the research direction of WoS. It is still obvious that the research in the field of ecological environment science accounted for more than half, reaching 58.84%, followed by “Marine freshwater biology,” “Oceanography,” “Water resources,” and “International relations” all reaching more than 10%.

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Table 1

The top 10 research directions of decision-making in marine management from 1990 to 2021.

Research direction	Publication number	Percentage
Environmental sciences ecology	1077	58.84
Marine freshwater biology	358	19.60
Oceanography	316	17.25
Water resources	229	12.50
International relations	216	11.80
Fisheries	175	9.55
Biodiversity conservation	144	7.86
Engineering	142	7.75
Science technology other topics	111	6.06
Geology	53	2.90

2.2. Feasibility Analysis of Bibliometric Methods

This paper mainly uses CiteSpace, a bibliometric tool, to study the development of marine management and decision-making. CiteSpace provides a logarithmic maximum likelihood algorithm for extracting tag words, and then a spatial visualization overview of clustered documents. Therefore, it is also called the knowledge mapping space. Different from other bibliometric tools such as HisCite, VosViewer. CiteSpace has the following advantages: (1) a wide range of research, strong compatibility with different data formats, and the ability to convert multiple data formats. (2) The spatial visualization of literature data, and the analysis results are directly presented. (3) The research covers a comprehensive range of perspectives, such as keyword evolution analysis, burst detection analysis, and cluster analysis, which are sufficient to express the development context, research hotspots, research trends and major frontiers of the research topics.

Specifically, this article uses CiteSpace to conduct bibliometric analysis from the two aspects of collaboration network and cited network. On the one hand, the collaboration network includes the author’s collaboration network, the institutions collaboration network, the countries collaboration network, and journals collaboration network. Through different research perspectives, we present a full range of influential and influential authors in this field, as well as important institutions, countries, and journals with more attention. On the other hand, the cited network includes document cluster analysis, burst detection analysis, and keyword evolution analysis. Also, the cited network includes references cluster analysis, burst detection analysis, and keyword evolution analysis. Different from the direct presentation of the cooperative network, the cited network in the field of marine management and decision-making will use different algorithms to deeply explore the links between the documents, or have clustering correlation, or have high-intensity citation influence, or shows the evolutionary process of keywords for representative jobs in different years.

3. Cluster Network of Decision-Making in Marine Management

In order to establish a better development mechanism, cluster analysis and co-citation are introduced in this paper. Cluster analysis is the process of classifying literature objects into groups according to the similarity among literature. Based on the cluster analysis of cited literature (references cited in existing downloaded literature) can not only provide a research lead. The classification navigation mechanism of domain can also dig out the research fields and directions with the nature of discipline integration. If two authors’ papers are simultaneously cited by a third author’s papers, it is said that the two authors are co-cited, the two papers are said to be co-citation. If the co-citation frequency of these two authors is higher, it indicates that their academic relationship is closer.

Cluster analysis and co-citation of decision-making in marine management can be obtained by using CiteSpace, as shown in Figure 3 and Table 2. Figure 3 shows the cluster network of decision-making in marine management, the whole is divided into 19 clusters, which are labeled by index terms from their citers and are summarized with “#.” As can be seen from Figure 3, we list the largest 10 clusters of decision-making in marine management, there are Marine Conservation, Ecosystem Services, Co-Management, Climate Change, Fisheries Management, Multiple Pressures, Marine Spatial Planning, Environmental Impact Assessment, Participatory Planning and MSFD, respectively.

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Table 2

The largest 10 clusters of decision-making in marine management from 1990 to 2021.

Cluster-ID	Size	Silhouette	Label (LLR)	Mean (year)
0	195	0.822	Marine conservation	2015
1	163	0.670	Ecosystem services	2013
2	150	0.688	Co-management	2009
3	149	0.769	Climate change	2014
4	147	0.804	Fisheries management	2003
5	137	0.741	Multiple pressures	2013
6	117	0.824	Marine spatial planning	2011
7	105	0.849	Environmental impact assessment	2012
8	100	0.853	Participatory planning	2012
9	79	0.785	MSFD	2008

Table 2 shows the top 10 clusters of decision-making in marine management. The largest cluster (#0) has 195 literature, and the second-largest cluster (#1) has 163 literature, followed by cluster (#2) has 150 literature. The log-likelihood ratio (LLR) is the algorithm that calculates each label and summarizes each cluster which the homogeneity of the clusters is tested by the silhouette score. And the “Label” is the label of each cluster, which can reflect their characteristics. Such as the cluster (#1)’s label is Marine Conservation, which means that the cluster (#1)’s topic is Marine Conservation. The silhouette score ranges from 0 to 1, when the silhouette is greater than 0.5, the corresponding result is considered to be reliable. As can be seen from Table 2, all silhouette scores are above 0.6, indicating that the quality of each cluster is reliable.

Based on the understanding of the top 10 clusters of decision-making in marine management, the top 10 cited references are shown in Table 3. We can see that the most cited papers made significant contributions to a certain research field, so two papers published in Nature and Science, which were Halpern et al. [1] and Edgar et al. [47] had the most co-citation counts with 48, had an important influence in the field of decision-making in marine management, followed by Douvere [46] with 37 co-citation counts.

Table 3

The top 10 cited references of decision-making in marine management from 1990 to 2021.

References	Source	Co-citation counts
Edgar et al. [47]	Nature	48
Halpern et al. [1]	Science	48
Douvere [46]	Marine Policy	37
White et al. [48]	P Natl Acad Sci USA	34
Guerry et al. [49]	International Journal of Biodiversity Science Ecosystem Services & Management	33
Levin et al. [50]	Plos Biology	30
Worm et al. [51]	Science	28
Halpern et al. [52]	Nature Communication	28
Halpern et al. [53]	Nature	26
Long et al. [54]	Marine Policy	25

4. Collaborative Analysis of Decision-Making in Marine Management

The collaborative analysis contributes to knowledge dissemination and effective academic communication [55], which further promotes knowledge creation and the development of various conferences [56]. To understand the specific situation of the collaborative relationship of decision-making in marine management, this section makes a detailed analysis from the following three aspects: institution collaborative analysis, country/region and journal collaborative analysis, and author collaborative analysis.

We can use CiteSpace to analyze the most productive institutions and authors, and the collaboration network of them also be analyzed by CiteSpace, which makes the results more accurate and objective. Additionally, the most productive countries/regions and journals are identified by using the records of WoS. Based on the results given by CiteSpace and WoS, further discussion can be seen below.

4.1. Institution Collaboration Analysis

Figure 4 shows the network of collaborating in the institution. In Figure 4, the size of the purple circle represents the number of papers published by the institution, and the number of connecting lines reflects the degree of collaboration between institutions. To further explain, the larger the circle, the more the number of published documents, and the thicker the connection lines, the closer the collaboration between institutions. As shown in Figure 4, In researching this area, the agency of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) chooses to collaborate with other members in various directions, which makes a significant contribution to decision-making applied to marine management. It is worth mentioning that the links between institutions are extensive but not close, which is not conducive to the formation of a core research team.

[figure(s) omitted; refer to PDF]

We have compiled the top 10 productivity organizations, and their details are shown in Table 4. According to Table 4, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (85 publications), University of Tasmania (72 publications), James Cook University (58 publications), University of Queensland (54 publications), University of California, Santa Barbara (45 publications), University of Washington (43 publications), Dalhousie University (39 publications), University of British Columbia (publications), Stanford University (32 publications), and CSIRO Oceans & Atmosphere (31 publications) are the top 10 most productive institutions. The total number of publications from the top 10 productivity institutions is 494, which accounts for 27.03%.

Table 4

The top 10 productive institutions of decision-making in marine management from 1990 to 2021.

Institution	Number	Percentage
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration	85	4.64
University of Tasmania	72	3.93
James Cook University	58	3.17
University of Queensland	54	2.95
University of California, Santa Barbara	45	2.50
University of Washington	43	2.35
Dalhousie University	39	2.13
University of British Columbia	35	1.91
Stanford University	32	1.75
CSIRO Oceans & Atmosphere	31	1.70

4.2. Country/Region and Journal Collaboration Analysis

A total of 123 countries/regions contributed 1380 documents, and Figure 5 shows the network of collaborating in countries/regions. It should be noted that the circles and connect lines have the same meanings as in Figure 4. There is no doubt that the United States has contributed the most to the volume of literature in this area, followed by Australia and England. The top 10 productivity countries/regions are displayed in Table 5, and their details are as follows: the USA (560 publications), Australia (297 publications), England (234 publications), Canada (151 publications), Germany (61 publications), Spain (51 publications), Peoples Republic of China (33 publications), Italy (17publications), France (14 publications), and Sweden (11 publications) are the top 10 most productive institutions. The total number of publications from the top 10 productivity countries is 929, which accounts for 78.09%. It can be clearly understood that the number of published papers in the top three countries accounted for more than half of the total, which is 59.73%. However, it can be observed that the cooperative relationship between countries or regions is not close, which is manifested by fewer and thinner connecting lines between circles in Figure 5. Although the rest of the countries’ published papers are relatively less, they also made big contributions in this research area. The papers about the decision-making theory in marine management published by the Chinese scholars only account for 1.8% in all the related papers, which indicates that the research in this field in China is relatively small. Therefore, there are a lot of works to do so that we can further improve the marine management in China.

[figure(s) omitted; refer to PDF]

Table 5

The top 10 productive journals of decision-making in marine management from 1990 to 2021.

Journals	Number	Percentage
Marine Policy	212	11.58
Ocean & Coastal Management	167	9.13
Frontiers in Marine Science	97	5.30
Journal of Environmental Management	41	2.24
Ices Journal of Marine Science	36	1.97
PLoS One	35	1.91
Marine Pollution Bulletin	32	1.75
Coastal Management	30	1.64
Ecology and Society	30	1.64
Science of the Total Environment	29	1.58

As shown in Table 5, the top 10 productive journals of decision-making in marine management are identified, according to the statistics from the WoS core collection database. It shows that Marine Policy is the most productive journal with 212 publications, which account for 11.58% of the total publications, followed by the Ocean Coastal Management, Frontiers in Marine Science, and Journal of Environmental Management, which have published over 200 papers related to decision-making and marine management. Besides, the articles published by other journals also made considerable contributions to this research area, such as “Understanding the use of ecosystem service knowledge in decision-making: lessons from international experiences of spatial planning” published by Environment and Planning C-government and Policy and “Human and organizational factors in maritime accidents: Analysis of collisions at sea using the HFACS” published by Accident Analysis and Prevention. Overall, not only the journals listed in Table 6 are the most prolific but also the articles published by them are also of great significance in improving the development of decision-making and marine management.

Table 6

The top 10 productive countries/regions of decision-making in marine management from 1990 to 2021.

Country	Number	Percentage
USA	560	30.60
Australia	297	16.23
England	234	12.79
Canada	151	8.25
Germany	61	3.33
Spain	51	2.79
Peoples Republic of China	33	1.80
Italy	17	0.93
France	14	0.77
Sweden	11	0.60

4.3. Author Collaboration Analysis

The author collaboration network that contributes to decision-making and marine management consisted of 288 authors and 643 collaboration links are presented in Figure 6. The meanings of nodes and connections in the network are consistent with Figure 4. The network demonstrates a large number of participants and extensive collaboration in decision-making and marine management research. Further, Table 7 lists the top 10 authors in this field. From Table 7, we find that Alistair et al. published 13 papers about decision-making in marine management by November 29, 2021, followed by Steven et al. with 9 papers, Marcus et al. were third, and Ingrid et al. were fourth, with Robert et al., Benjamin et al., Carolyn et al., Chiristopher et al., Hobday et al., Peter et al., and Halpern et al. completing the top 10 productive authors. The community structure of author collaboration is relatively loose. For example, Peter et al., Hobody et al., and Robert et al. are independent research individuals. In particular, there is little collaboration between them and other researchers. Alistair et al., Marcus et al., Chiristopher et al., Olivier et al., and so on have built a tight network of cooperation, and they are also the more productive authors. This seems to indicate that effective collaboration can help authors study the content of the field. Therefore, the authors should strengthen cooperation to promote the research.

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Table 7

The top 10 productive authors of decision-making in marine management from 1990 to 2021.

Author	Number	Year
Alistair J. H.	13	2017
Steven J. C.	9	2015
Marcus H.	8	2019
Ingrid V. P.	7	2015
Robert L. P.	6	2010
Benjamin S. H.	6	2012
Carolyn J. L.	5	2016
Chiristopher C.	5	2019
Hobday A. J.	5	2015
Peter J. M.	5	2015

Through the analysis of the above three parts, we find the conclusion that the cooperative network between institutions is relatively dense, while the cooperative network between countries and authors is relatively sparse. To expand research in the areas of decision-making and ocean management, collaborative relationships, involving authors and countries, should be further strengthened.

5. Burst Detection of Decision-Making in Marine Management

Scholars also focus on emerging trends when researching areas they are interested in, and they shed light on new research directions and cutting-edge methods. Burst detection refers to the key term that the frequency of occurrence increases suddenly or the frequency of use increases significantly in a short period of time, which can reflect the frontier dynamics, attention, and research trend of relevant research. The greater the burst, the more emerging and active the topic will be. In order to reveal the potential research directions, this paper selects references with citation bursts and keywords with bursts to explain the application of decision-making in marine management.

Keywords, as a high summary of the research hotspot of academic papers, are the core and essence of the paper, indicating the research hotspot of the subject field. This study analyses the keywords and their burst detection in the field of decision-making in marine management and sorts out the research hotspots. As shown in Table 8, we list the top 20 keywords with the strongest citation bursts, and different keywords with bursts reflect the research characteristic of different periods. The Strength represents the impact of this keyword, the higher the value, the greater the impact. The Begin and End represent the year in which the keyword existed, it also shows the influence time of the keyword. From Table 8, we can see that the keyword “Management” has the largest strength, which means that “Management” has the most important position in the research field, followed by “Fishery” and “Population.” The keyword “Diversity” was brought up in 1993 and ended in 2009, which has the longest duration time, meaning the influence of “Diversity” lasted the longest.

Table 8

The top 20 keywords with strongest citation bursts from 1990 to 2021.

Keyword	Strength	Begin	End	1990–2021
Diversity	4.57	1993	2009
Management	10.44	1998	2007
Population	6.13	2001	2011
Fishery	9.18	2002	2007
Uncertainty	3.90	2002	2008
Risk	4.49	2004	2011
Impact	3.71	2004	2009
Resource	4.67	2008	2013
Information	4.60	2009	2011
Sediment	4.50	2009	2011
Decision-making	4.04	2009	2010
Comanagement	5.40	2010	2013
Stock assessment	4.86	2010	2014
Reserve	4.76	2010	2014
Analytic hierarchy process	3.95	2010	2011
Policy	4.05	2011	2013
Ecology	3.94	2011	2014
Canada	3.90	2018	2019
Public participation	5.30	2019	2020
People	4.23	2019	2020

We can roughly divide the keywords in marine management into three periods according to Table 8. The first period is 1990–2009, in this time, “Diversity” and “Management” were proposed for the first time, clarifying the importance of biodiversity in marine management. Then “Population,” “Fishery,” and “Uncertainty” were proposed successively, meaning the focus of marine management was changing over time. From the natural environment to human behavior, the importance of human behavior to marine management was emphasized. The second period is 2009–2014. During this period, marine management developed rapidly, and keywords such as “Resource,” “Information,” “Decision-making,” and “Co-management” emerged. The last period is 2018–2020, during this period, keywords have one thing in common, that is, they were related to human beings, which means that humans are now at the heart of marine management. Nowadays, the marine ecology has been greatly damaged by human beings. With the idea of protecting the ecological environment deeply rooted in people’s minds, human beings have begun to pay more and more attention to marine ecology.

Reference citation bursts, which refer to an article that has received sharp increases in citations, can show the attention to relevant literature and reflects the emerging trends of the research field. The top 20 references with the strongest citations bursts of decision-making in marine management are shown in Table 9. As observed, the earliest citations burst started in 2002, meaning that researchers began to pay more and more attention to marine management from this time. In the top 20 references with the strongest citations bursts, Worm et al. [51] had the highest strength value, which means this article had the biggest and longest influence, followed by Pikitch et al. [63] and Pauly et al. [59]. Worm et al. [51] focused on marine biodiversity, which concluded that marine biodiversity loss was increasingly impairing the marine capacity.

Table 9

The top 20 references with strongest citation bursts from 1990 to 2021.

Reference	Strength	Begin	End	1990–2021
Pauly et al. [57]	5.42	2002	2005
Jackon et al. [58]	6.63	2004	2008
Pauly et al. [59]	6.72	2004	2010
Gell et al. [60]	6.61	2005	2010
Halpern et al. [61]	4.40	2005	2010
Agardy et al. [62]	3.85	2005	2010
Worm et al. [51]	9.41	2007	2014
Pikitch et al. [63]	7.80	2007	2012
Crowder et al. [64]	5.72	2007	2014
Klein et al. [65]	3.50	2009	2013
Costello et al. [66]	3.93	2010	2012
Douvere [46]	3.77	2010	2014
Rosenberg and McLeod [67]	4.01	2010	2011
Douvere [46]	6.23	2011	2016
Leslie [68]	4.23	2011	2015
Worm et al. [69]	3.57	2011	2017
Hughes et al. [70]	3.87	2011	2013
Berkes [71]	4.69	2012	2016
Martin et al. [72]	3.53	2012	2015
Ostrom [73]	5.35	2012	2015

Researchers focused on fisheries conservation in marine management [57, 59, 60, 63, 66], conservation of marine resource management [61, 62], biodiversity in marine management [51], and decision-making in marine management [64, 65]. In other words, these topics were the research directions in this period.

6. Conclusions

This paper has focused on the topic of decision-making and its application in marine management and summarized the current status and emerging trends of this research field, which is helpful for beginners who are interested in this field to understand its development in recent years. To be specific, this paper has analyzed the decision-making theory and its application in marine management field from the aspects of cluster network and co-citation analysis, collaboration analysis of countries, journals, institutions, and authors. Besides, the burst detection analysis of keywords and references has also been applied by using CiteSpace. Based on the above results, the findings of this paper can be summarized as follows: First, the number of publications is relatively stable during the early 1990–2003 period and begins to increase in the phases after 2003, which means that the decision-making and marine management researches have attracted the increasing attention from many scholars. Second, there have 19 clusters and the largest cluster is marine conservation research, which means that marine conservation is a hot topic in recent years. Third, the USA is the most productive country in this research field, and Marine Policy is the most prolific journal with 212 publications. In addition, most of the active authors and institutions in the decision-making and marine management fields are also significantly impacting the related researches. Lastly, in consideration of the hotspots and the emerging trends in this research area, the keyword of “Diversity” appeared most frequently, which has the longest duration that began in 1993 and ended in 2009, followed by “Management” and “Population.” Besides, “People” and “Public participation” are the emerging trends in the decision-making and marine management fields. According to the visual analysis and literature review about the decision-making in marine management, it is easy for the readers to obtain a better understanding of the trends and developments in this research.

Thus, in this paper, from some different perspectives of the bibliometric analysis, we have provided an overview about the current status and the emerging trends of the decision-making theory in marine management, which can help researchers who are interested in knowing the general picture of this knowledge domain and understand the dynamics of hotspots in the past few decades. However, it is noted that some limitations can be found in this paper. For example, only two bibliometric analysis tools have been used in this paper and then the derived results are limited and the main issues, namely decision-making and marine management, are two general concepts and lead to some obvious conclusions. Thus, for future researches, we can focus on the above limitations and provide a more comprehensive bibliometric analysis by introducing more databases and fusing more techniques so that we can help the researchers step into a mature stage and develop the related theories. Obviously, this is an important and valuable issue for the marine study in modern society.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 72071176).

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