50 years of the Coastal Zone Management Act: The bibliometric influence of the first coastal management law on the world

In 1972, the first coastal zone management law in the world was approved in the United States. Fifty years later, its influence on other national and international legislation is clear, but how this law has influenced the scientific community is not yet determined. Through a scientometric analysis based on the Web of Science and Scopus databases, over 11,340 bibliographic references were consolidated and refined to extract those directly related to legal aspects of coastal management. A final set of 135 scientific documents published between the years 1974 and 2022 were analyzed with the tool Core of Science®. As a result, the Tree of Science was obtained, which identifies the precursory (roots), axis (trunk), and promising (leaves) documents related to coastal regulation. Another output was a compilation of the scientific production over the last 50 years as documented in both databases, allowing us to extract the countries, journals, and authors who were most productive in advancing research on the legal issues of ICZM. Moreover, co-authorship networks were identified based on the most active geographical regions and authors. In the end, a brief reflection is provided about the influence that a legal instrument can have on the scientific community and vice versa.