The Economics of Fisheries in the Mediterranean Basin: A Scoping Review by Means of Citation Patterns Analysis

The aim of the present scoping review is to explore and synthesize the scientific research on the economics of fisheries with a particular regard to the Mediterranean Basin. The general purpose of conducting scoping reviews is to identify and map the major available scientific evidence on a specific subject of interest. Moreover, we decided to support the analytical phase of the scoping review by means of a citation patterns analysis. For this purpose, we used an open-source software tool named CitNetExplorer with the aim of interlinking and screening the scientific literature in terms of its nature, features, conceptual boundaries, and advancement in results. The use of a citation patterns analysis tool allowed us to map the development of the economics of fisheries over time, visualizing the most important publications on the subject and discovering how publications build on each other. Since there are no recent studies that offer an overview of the evolution of the scientific effort on the subject of interest, the goal of the present study is to compensate for this gap.