Coral restoration: a mapping review through a scientometric analysis

Abstract

Reef restoration has gained attention as it has strategic actions and powerful means in sustaining and maintaining coastal ecosystem services. This scientometric study systematically analyzes the current trends and research hotspot in coral restoration across the last five decades (1971–2022). The metadata (12,667 articles with 652,860 cited references) were obtained from the Clarivate Web of Science platform through the Core Collection database, associated with the CiteSpace and R‐software for further analysis. The results indicated that the trend of coral restoration is increasing in paper/year, with the United States, Australia, and China as major contributors to the related research. Furthermore, James Cook University, Australia had the largest number of articles, and the Consortium of Research Libraries of the United Kingdom was the most influential institution on coral restoration. The highly cited keywords are “Great Barrier Reef,” “climate change,” and “coral reef,” while the most influential keywords are “coral,” “model,” and “Atlantic.” A total of 23 clusters in the field with “coral reef,” “phase shift,” “bacterial communities,” “coral restoration,” “symbiotic dinoflagellate,” “stony coral tissue loss disease,” “bleaching event,” “ocean acidification,” “oyster reef,” and “quantitative reconstruction” are among the top cluster size labeled. Early‐stage researcher may use both keywords and cluster analysis to find topics attractive to their future research projects. In addition, this study contributes toward evaluating recent scientific productivity about coral restoration as well as informing researchers and policymakers regarding funding, future strategic planning, and potential collaboration opportunities.