Between geography and transport: A scientometric analysis of port studies in Journal of Transport Geography

Created in 1993, the particularity of Journal of Transport Geography (JTRG) is to put ‘transport’ at center stage in human geography, long after similar initiatives about cultural, tourism, political, urban, and rural geographies. The goal of this research is to estimate JTRG's relative importance of (and interplay between) ‘transport specialization’ and ‘human geography’, focusing on port-related research as a case study. Constituting a database of 864 port articles published in JTRG and other selected geography and (non-geography) transport journals between 2009 and 2018 constitutes the backbone of our analysis. We particularly examine the thematic focus and the geographic scale of the corpus articles, which we complement by an analysis of their references. Main results reveal a stable preference for global-level studies and operational research, but compared with other journals, our corpus is marked by a stronger affinity with regional/national spatial scales and the locational (i.e., space-related) perspective. We conclude that JTRG publications (about ports) are more multidisciplinary than in other geography and transport journals. The paper contributes to a better understanding of the disciplinary evolution of academic research in the field of spatial studies, transport studies, and beyond.