RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT TRENDS OF MARINEG EOLOGYIN ＂THE BELT AND ROAD＂ REGIONS

Marine geology plays an important role in the development of national economics as well as geological sciences. Based on the SCIE articles in the Web of Science Database during 1968-2017, using bibliometric method and citation analysis as tools, we analyzed about 13 000 concerned papers and found that: ① The general number of papers on marine geological research in “the Belt and Road” regions has maintained a positive growth trend with obvious periodicity; ② Asia, Central Europe and Eastern Europe countries are the main contributors to the research of marine geology, China and Russia are obviously the centers of the cooperation networks among the countries which published most of the papers, and the number of papers published in the past five years by China is far ahead of other countries; ③ Marine geology research in “the Belt and Road” region mainly focuses on the subjects of geology, earth science, oceanography, geochemistry and geophysics, seabed geological structures, special geomorphology, marine sediment source, sediment distribution and transportation, seabed minerals and oil and gas resources, seabed geological movement and topographic evolution, paleo-oceanography and geological environment studies around coastal China, the Marmara Sea and the Dead Sea. However, the cooperation in marine geological research in “the Belt and Road” regions is still weak. It is recommended that China strengthen international cooperation with belt and road countries according to their needs, pay more attention to the research characteristics of international research institutions in the belt and road countries and jointly formulate strategic goals for cooperation, and as the result, we can obtain more scientific research output with higher quality from other countries to improve our research in the field of marine geology.