Fifty Years of Research in The Commonwealth of The Bahamas: A Quantitative Thematic Analysis of Scholarly Output

Abstract

This study presents the first longitudinal bibliometric mapping of peer—reviewed research on The Bahamas, analyzing 12,113 Web of Science records (1975–2025) using CiteSpace v.6.4.R2. We identified 36 co—citation clusters (modularity Q = 0.7967; silhouette = 0.9231) and 28 keyword clusters (Q = 0.7523; silhouette = 0.8695), revealing 8 thematic trajectories over 5 decades. Early research (prior to 1990) focused on carbonate geology and sea—level dynamics across the northwestern Bahama Platform and Blake—Bahama Basin (Cluster#0, silhouette = 0.939). From the 1990s–mid—2000s, attention shifted to marine fisheries, Aliger gigas, coral reefs, and ecological resilience (Cluster #1, n = 203). In the late—2000s, oceanography, microbial ecology, and stromatolitic systems were most common (Cluster #4, silhouette = 0.982). Post—2010 research encompassed public health, climate impacts, and computational methods. Burst terms (terms showing rapid, time—bounded increases in usage rather than simply the most frequent terms) including “health” (24.39), “resilience” (19.82), and “impact” (31.21) indicate rising interdisciplinarity. Persistent underrepresentation of social—ecological systems, local knowledge, and climate—governance research shows the need for transdisciplinarity, local authorship, and alignment with national development frameworks. See Supplemental Figure S1 for a graphical abstract summarizing the main findings of this study.