MAPPING AIRPORT COMPETITIVENESS RESEARCH: A COMBINED BIBLIOMETRIC AND STRUCTURAL TOPIC MODELING ANALYSIS
Abstract
Background and Objective: Airport competitiveness has become an increasingly important issue in air transport economics, yet the literature remains fragmented across efficiency studies, market-access analyses, sustainability debates, and operational research. This study maps the contemporary knowledge base on airport competitiveness and clarifies how the field conceptualizes the phenomenon.
Study Design/Materials and Methods: The analysis is based on 303 publications indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection for 2015–2025, derived from an initial set of 433 records. The study combines descriptive bibliometrics, cited-reference co-citation analysis, document-level bibliographic coupling, and Structural Topic Modeling applied to titles, abstracts, and keywords.
Results: The results show a field that has moved from a relatively specialized niche toward a broader and more differentiated research domain. Co-citation mapping reveals an established intellectual core organized around performance measurement, efficiency, governance, and competition. Bibliographic coupling identifies active research fronts linked to benchmarking, connectivity and intermodality, sustainability transition, and digitally enabled airport operations. The STM results recover six topics and indicate a gradual shift from narrow benchmarking concerns toward wider agendas of regional development, resilience, sustainability, and operational intelligence.
Practical implications: For airport managers and public authorities, the findings suggest that competitiveness should be treated as a multidimensional capability shaped jointly by governance arrangements, infrastructure and investment decisions, network positioning, and transition readiness.
Conclusion and summary: The article shows that airport competitiveness is best understood not as a single performance indicator, but as the relative ability of airports to attract, coordinate, and sustain traffic and economic value under changing technological, environmental, and spatial conditions.
Keywords:
airport competitiveness, bibliometrics, co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, structural topic modelingDetails
- Issue
- Vol. 1 No. 42 (2026)
- Section
- Research article
- Published
- 2026-04-30
- DOI:
- https://doi.org/10.19253/reme.2026.01.004
- Licencja:
-
Copyright (c) 1970 Research on Enterprise in Modern Economy
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This is an Open Access journal, all articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
