Abstract:

One Belt One Road project cover approximately sixty-five percent of the world population and One Road is the main site of the project, including the sea route. The purpose of the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road is to increase the trade volume between western and eastern ports, especially Chinese ports. Maritime Silk Road (MSR) will also help economic cooperation between participating countries and increase connectivity between ports located through the route of the project. There is only one OBOR related review article in the literature however, there is no MSR review article. To fill this gap, the main aim of this study is to find out and examine MSR-related articles that contain a perspective of the context, vision, and geographical coverage of the initiative in terms of Bibliometric Analysis factors. The systematic literature review has been applied to obtain secondary data from Scopus, Science Direct, Web of Science, and Springer link websites to create our sample. Hsieh and Shannon's (2005) method was applied in this review article as a qualitative research approach. In the research process of the study, 45 out of 224 articles were selected to cover our main research objectives. As a result, this study provides categorization analysis to classify selected 45 MSR articles that cover different subjects such as transport infrastructure, challenges, and opportunities of MSR, maritime security, port network, transport connectivity, environmental issues. Besides, evaluation of the articles year by year that forms our sample was given in a detailed way in the research. The main contribution of this study is grouping the selected MSR articles in terms of their subjects and explaining common points to give ideas to researchers about the studied and unstudied subjects related to the MSR initiative. For future research, academics and researchers may focus on the methodologies of the MSR-related articles.

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