### Research Gap, Aim, and Contribution of the Paper  
The literature review presented above confirms that mariculture is a very important, wide, and propulsive field with extensive research content, ranging from broad theoretical analyses to case studies focusing on specific issues. However, some aspects such as sustainability and emerging digital technologies in this field appear in more recent references, implying their importance in the future. Therefore, an extensive bibliometric study in this area is needed to review the development process and to identify current research hotspots as well as future research directions. The contributions of this work can be summarized as follows:  
* Detection of emerging topics in the field of mariculture published in the last decade;
* Summary of the conducted research and illustration of major knowledge groups in the field;
* Identification of the most cited journals and authors in the field;
* Identification of research hotspots;
* Summary of the current status and possible future development trends;
* Advantages and drawbacks of CiteSpace and VOSviewer and their differences for scientometric purposes, where the mariculture field is taken as a test case.  
The novelty of this paper is to provide a broader insight into problems and challenges in aquaculture, with the use of scientometrics tools. Bibliometric analysis is a useful tool for searching the intellectual structure of a specific research field, handling large amounts of scientific data, and producing high-impact research. One of its strengths is the flexibility while it allows researchers to easily handle the data imported from various databases such as Scopus or Web of Science. Bibliometrics can be descriptive, such as counting the number of articles published by organizations or countries, as well as evaluative, such as usingcitation analysis to determine how those articles influenced other authors. While counting publications is useful for some comparisons, citation analysis allows us to look at the impact those articles have on others. The bibliometric analysis enables and empowers scholars to gain a comprehensive overview, identify knowledge gaps, generate novel research ideas, and position their contributions to the field. Well-conducted bibliometric studies can offer a solid starting point for advancement in a specific field in novel and meaningful ways.  
In this paper, the CiteSpace and VOSviewer platforms are used as complementary tools for greater field coverage. Data selection is primarily based on research topic and keywords, and distinguished by authors, journals, and countries. CiteSpace is well-known and used around the world to review articles [47]. The program has clarity and interpretability of visualizations and visual analytic capabilities [48] and can be used to detect landmarks, hotspots, developing trends, and important points in a series of publications [49]. Users can navigate and explore various patterns and trends discovered in scientific papers, developing a wider grasp of the scientific literature than an unguided search through the literature. VOSviewer can display a map in a variety of ways, each highlighting a distinct facet of the map. The programs' viewing capabilities are notably beneficial for maps with at least a relatively significant number of elements (e.g., at least 100 items) [50]. The VOS mapping approach helps to lay out things on the maps and elements' location will reflect their similarity [51].