| Abstract: |
The Sundarbans, the world's largest contiguous mangrove ecosystem shared between India and Bangladesh, has attracted sustained scholarly attention owing to its ecological, socio-economic, and climatic significance. Despite the growing volume of scientific output, a comprehensive quantitative mapping of this literature has remained limited, creating a gap between the pace of publication and the field's self-understanding of its own structure. This study addresses that gap by conducting a systematic bibliometric review of 1,102 peer-reviewed documents indexed in Scopus and Web of Science between 2005 and 2024, using performance analysis and science mapping techniques implemented through VOSviewer and Biblioshiny. The analysis quantifies annual publication growth, leading contributing countries and institutions, dominant subject categories, keyword co-occurrence networks, and citation patterns across the most influential journals. Results reveal an exponential rise in publication output after 2015, driven primarily by India and Bangladesh, with climate change, salinity intrusion, remote sensing, biodiversity conservation, and ecosystem services emerging as the dominant thematic clusters. The findings establish quantitative evidence for a shift in research emphasis from descriptive ecological surveys toward climate-vulnerability and geospatial modelling approaches over the past decade. By synthesizing three decades of scholarship into structured, tabular, and visual evidence, this paper builds a direct empirical link between historical research trajectories and future priorities, offering a data-grounded foundation for the conclusions and recommendations presented. The study contributes a replicable methodological framework for bibliometric assessment of ecologically critical but understudied regions and identifies concrete gaps for future interdisciplinary research on the Sundarbans. |
