Identifying the Blue Economy Global Epistemic Community

Abstract

The following article aims to identify the characteristics of the epistemic community of Blue Economy researchers, through the description of its scientific production, its special organization and clustering. The information was examined using bibliometric techniques on 302 research works using the Web of Science databases (JCR) between 2013 and 2021. At the same time, VOSviewer software was used to represent the relationships metrically and visually between the data and metadata. A set of research works is reviewed which relates environmental conservation and its implication in the development of the territory, and the relationship between technology and the improvement of ocean management, to highlight those state interventions where benefits are generated for the population or where there is an important challenge for improvement.

Blue Economy, Blue Growth, Social Equity and Small-scale Fisheries: A Global and National Level Review

“…Apart from researchers and agencies responsible for implementing the BE, there are other stakeholder ideas that may represent critical gaps in the knowledge domain and need to be explored. Moreover, the promises of public-private partnerships in the implementation phases of BE/BG cannot be fulfilled if monopolization occurs (Mallin et al, 2019;Vega-Muñoz et al, 2021). Nevertheless, the research community can ask-'What blue economic growth strategies ensure synergies that safeguard social equity?'…”

“…The risk of inequality in enforcing the distribution of benefits from the oceans always prevails (Wynberg and Hauck, 2014). A crucial equity problem is the unfair distribution of access to ecosystem services, which leads to destabilising The lack of consideration of local voices in development project implementation marginalizes coastal communities (Kerr et al, 2017;Flannery et al, 2018;Vega-Muñoz et al, 2021). A systematic literature study on the two decades of scientific publication on frequently appeared stakeholders in the constructs of 'blue economy' and 'sustainable development goals', reveals that the key stakeholders are i) government agencies/policy makers, ii) NGOs, iii) Scientists/Researchers, iv) Business/Industries, and v) Local community/Society.…”

Bibliometric Analysis on Ocean Literacy Studies for Marine Conservation

“…The measurement was performed using documented scientific research, using bibliometric laws as support. For the study of scientific production, we started from Price's law [44][45][46][47][48], evaluating the annual exponential growth of published documents, based on the adjusted determination coefficient (R 2 ) of the trend line using Microsoft Excel. This measure corroborates whether there is interest in the scientific community in the advancement of research on a topic.…”

“…When determining the group of authors with the most published papers, called prolific authors, in the ocean literacy topic, we used Lotka's law [46,47,[49][50][51]. These are estimated using the square root of the total number of authors who have contributed to a set of sampled papers, which is additionally verified with the adjustment of the power law between authors who publish and published papers, using the coefficient of determination (R 2 ) calculated in Microsoft Excel.…”

The Application of Blue Economy Principles to the Salt Sector in the Province of East Java, Indonesia

“…The Blue Economy will boost the long-term benefits of sustainable marine resource use by finding profitable ocean sectors and activities. These benefits have a worldwide annual value of trillions of dollars, are responsible for the maintenance of hundreds of millions of jobs, and are beneficial to all nations located in coastal zones, which are home to approximately half of the world's population (Vega-Muñoz et al, 2021).…”