A bibliometric analysis of global research on united nations security council sanctions (1990–2023)

UNSC sanctions have been referred to as a powerful tool increasingly used by the UNSC to maintain international peace and security based on Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter. This study conducts a bibliometric analysis to provide a comprehensive overview of the current research status, developments trends, and research hotspots in UNSC sanctions research from 1990 to 2023. This study uses CiteSpace to visualize and analyze datasets of 345 articles about UNSC sanctions obtained from the Web of Science (WOS) database. The research on UNSC sanctions has three stages: the initial development stage (1990–2006), the transitional development stage (2007–2017), and the rapid development stage (2018–2023). This study describes UNSC sanctions research status, trends, hotspots, and distributions of publications by journal sources, disciplines, countries, institutions, and authors. It also describes the knowledge-based mapping and research hotspots on UNSC sanctions, including keywords, citation burst, keyword clusters, keyword clusters timeline view, cited references, intellectual base, and descriptive analysis. In addition, this study analyzed UNSC sanctions research divided into four domain categories: implementation, human rights, impacts, and specific regimes. The results showed that the topic of UNSC sanctions was multidisciplinary research and that scholars from different research disciplines had different focuses on UNSC sanctions. This study offers valuable insights into the current hot topics within the field of UNSC sanctions and offers recommendations for future research directions.