GCC Labour Migration Research - Bibliometric Analysis

Description

This dataset supports a bibliometric and science mapping study of peer-reviewed research on labour migration in the six member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) published between 2000 and 2025. The analysed collection comprises 730 English-language journal articles, assembled from Scopus (696 records retrieved) and the Web of Science Core Collection (393 retrieved) on 16 July 2026 and screened following PRISMA 2020: 321 duplicates were removed before screening, 18 records were excluded at screening (12 book chapters and 6 outside the publication window), and 20 were excluded at eligibility because their analytic subject was not labour migration despite naming a GCC state. The deposit contains: (1) The validated collection of 730 records in Scopus export format (2) Excel workbook of 19 worksheets holding the computed values behind every figure and table in the associated article (3) Six VOSviewer-loadable network files covering author-keyword co-occurrence (63 nodes, 197 links), reference co-citation (116 nodes, 389 links), and document bibliographic coupling (286 nodes, 857 links), together with the 77-mapping keyword harmonisation thesaurus and a parameter guide.

Steps to reproduce

1. Re-run the two Boolean queries reported verbatim in Appendix A of the associated article, in Scopus and in the Web of Science Core Collection, restricted to journal articles in English published 2000-2025. 2. Apply the PRISMA 2020 screening described in the article's Methods: remove book chapters and out-of-window records, deduplicate across databases by DOI and then by normalised title, and apply the topical-relevance screen. The file 05_reproduction/analysis_pipeline.py performs and verifies these steps; place it in a directory containing the two raw exports together with offtopic_removed_titles.json and run it under Python 3. It prints the count at each stage and exits with status 0 only if the final collection is 730 records. 3. For the network analyses, load 01_collection/GCC_collection_730_scopus_format.csv into VOSviewer, supplying 03_vosviewer_networks/thesaurus_keywords.txt as the thesaurus, and apply the thresholds documented in README_VOSviewer.txt. Alternatively, load the supplied map and network file pairs directly to obtain the published networks without recomputation. 4. All performance-analysis values, cluster memberships and period splits reported in the article are held in 02_analysis_tables, one worksheet per analysis, and can be checked directly against the figures and tables.

Institutions

• Sultan Qaboos University

  Muscat, Muscat

Categories

Licence