Meta-review Dataset - Road Freight Transport
Description
# Dataset Description: Meta-Review of Road Freight Transport Research (2021 to 2025) ## 1. Overview This dataset accompanies the study "Road Freight Transport at the Crossroads: A Meta-review", a PRISMA-guided meta-review of 104 review papers in road freight transport published between 2021 and 2025. The dataset documents the full evidence trail of the systematic review process, from initial database queries through screening and exclusion to the final included corpus, together with completed PRISMA compliance checklists. It enables full reproducibility of the study's selection procedure and supports secondary analyses of the road freight review landscape. The dataset is organized into three components corresponding to successive stages of the PRISMA workflow: (1) initial identification records from three bibliographic databases, (2) papers excluded during full-text assessment with documented rejection rationale, and (3) the final set of 104 reviews included in the meta-review with thematic classification and bibliographic metadata. Two completed PRISMA 2020 checklists are also provided to document reporting compliance. --- ## 2. Research Context and Hypothesis ### 2.1 Problem Statement Road freight transport is responsible for approximately 40% of total road transport emissions globally, yet the research landscape addressing this challenge is structurally fragmented. Domains that are functionally interdependent (e.g., electrification and grid infrastructure, automation and labor markets, alternative fuels and critical mineral supply chains) are investigated in near-complete isolation, producing unreconciled and sometimes contradictory findings. Despite this fragmentation, no meta-review has attempted a field-wide synthesis of road freight research or assessed the methodological quality of its secondary evidence base. For more details please read the "description.md" file.
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## 3. Data Collection Methodology ### 3.1 Search Strategy Three bibliographic databases were queried on 27 July 2025: | Database | Query Scope | Records Retrieved | |----------|------------|-------------------| | **Scopus** | TITLE-ABS-KEY field; proximity and wildcard operators | 376 | | **Web of Science** | Topic (TS) field; NEAR proximity operators | 302 | | **TRID** | Full-text Boolean search | 176 | | **Total** | | **854** | Search terms were designed to capture the full spectrum of road freight research, including core terms (road freight, haulage, cargo, delivery, logistics) and supplementary terms (truck, lorry, heavy-duty vehicle, motor freight, motor carrier), with wildcard and proximity operators for sensitivity. ### 3.2 Temporal and Language Restrictions The search was limited to review articles published in English between 2021 and 2025. The temporal restriction was applied for three reasons: (1) including older reviews would conflate historical and contemporary gap diagnoses; (2) recent reviews already subsume earlier primary literature (mean reference age of 6.2 years across the final corpus); and (3) accelerating policy mandates and technology deployment since 2020 have transformed the domain. ### 3.3 Screening Process Screening followed the PRISMA protocol in multiple stages: 1. **Deduplication**: Removal of duplicate records across databases. 2. **Title and abstract screening**: Using Rayyan systematic review management software, with predefined inclusion/exclusion criteria applied by two independent reviewers. 3. **Full-text assessment**: Independent evaluation of eligibility by two researchers, with discrepancies resolved through discussion and consensus. ### 3.4 Inclusion Criteria Studies were included if they addressed the broader transportation context of road freight (goods movement, logistics systems, environmental/social/economic dimensions), discussed technological innovations with system-wide implications, or examined barriers, challenges, or policy frameworks for the sector. Both explicitly designated review papers and general reviews performing a similar synthesis function (surveys, industrial reports) were considered. ### 3.5 Exclusion Criteria Papers were excluded if they focused on narrow technical aspects without system-level implications (e.g., medical/health studies, component-level engineering, infrastructure materials science), addressed only light-duty vehicles, or contained only tangential references to heavy goods vehicles. Example query: TITLE-ABS-KEY( (road PRE/1 (freight OR haulage OR shipment OR cargo OR delivery OR logistics OR "goods transport*")) OR ("heavy duty vehicle*" OR "goods vehicle*" OR lorr* OR truck* OR "motor freight*" OR "motor carrier*") ) For more info, please read the associated paper.