Sea Level Rise and Coastal Erosion Adaptation: A Bibliometric Analysis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.71238/jmrcs.v1i01.198Keywords:
Bibliometric Analysis; Climate Adaptation; Coastal Erosion; Sea Level Rise; Shoreline ChangeAbstract
Sea level rise is speeding up shoreline retreat on many coasts, and research on how societies should adapt to coastal erosion has grown quickly across several disciplines. This study maps that body of work through a bibliometric analysis of 1,756 Scopus-indexed documents published between 1983 and 2026. VOSviewer was used to build keyword co-occurrence, overlay and density maps, together with co-authorship networks at the author, institution and country levels, while the most cited documents were examined through citation analysis. Five thematic clusters were found: coastal geomorphology and sediment dynamics, coastal zone management and risk assessment, climate-driven shoreline response, remote sensing and shoreline monitoring, and coastal ecosystems such as mangroves and wetlands. Coastal erosion and sea level rise form the densest core of the field, while recent studies have moved toward remote sensing, machine learning, hazard assessment, decision making and ecosystem-based adaptation. The United States, the United Kingdom, France, China and Germany lead international collaboration, and author groups around Ranasinghe, Nicholls and Le Cozannet connect several research communities. Collaboration between institutions remains thin and is concentrated in Arctic coastal research. The most cited works deal with global shoreline dynamics, deltas and the limits of the Bruun Rule. The results call for research that ties physical projections to planning, financing and community-level adaptation, particularly in the Global South and in small island states.
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