## 5 Conclusions  
The mariculture industry faces some challenges, and this paper focuses on technical problems such as choosing the proper location, especially tending to offshore marculture, optimal selection of farming cages, feeding process, biofouling problems, waste management or impacts on marine pollution. There are different programs for bibliometric analysis and in this paper, two programs were used: CiteSpace and VOSviewer.  
The main contributions can be summarized as follows:  
* Technical and environmental problems are more studied than other challenges. Focus should be not only on these problems, but on the location choice and its challenges, waste management, or feeding process in the marculture production.
* Most publications in the field of marculture were published in 2021, and the number of citations of publications are continuously growing.
* The most common identified hotspots are divided into four categories: technical, biological, digital, and environmental.
* Based on the citation analysis, the most cited articles are related to the environmental problems and solutions in the marine aquaculture and study of biofouling and how to control it. Other important documents with high citation rates are related to the cages, offshore marculture, location conditions, and sustainability.
* Countries with highly developed aquaculture production are those with the most articles, such as the USA, China, Australia, Canada, Norway, and Scotland, as expected.
* The top three journals in the field of aquaculture are Fish and Fisheries, Reviews in Aquaculture, and Aquaculture Nutrition; they are all ranked with Q1 or first quartile.
* CiteSpace has more options for filtering and analyzing the data, and various combinations while analyzing cited journals, keywords, authors, abstract words, and others. VOSviewer is preferable for mapping the data and visualization (e.g., countries or keywords). Cluster differentiation is more accurately explained in CiteSpace, and it is more specific than in VOSviewer.  
Based on this paper and the literature review, it can be concluded that marculture will be even more important in the future. Thus, it is necessary to analyze, study, and perform experiments on the topics related to the mentioned problems in this study and how to deal with them in a more sustainable way. Future research could compare other databases, such as Scopus, PubMed, and EmBase, to WoS to look for contradictions in the data. The combination of precise literature research and more bibliographic software, in order to conduct more precise research, may lead to the goal of creating sustainable marculture production. Since this scientometric analysis focuses on the total marculture sector and activities, future research can expand on this topic by focusing on some of the most important species or groups in the marine aquaculture industry.  
**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, N.V. and A.F.; methodology, N.V., M.K., I.C. and A.F.; software, T.B.; validation, M.K., M.V. and I.C.; formal analysis, T.B. and M.K.; investigation, T.B., N.V., M.K., M.V., I.C. and A.F.; resources, N.V.; data curation, T.B.; writing--original draft preparation, T.B.; writing--review and editing, T.B. and M.V.; visualization, T.B.; supervision, N.V., I.C. and A.F.; project administration, N.V.; funding acquisition, N.V. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
**Funding:** This investigation has been co-funded by the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund of the European Union within the project \"INTEL-MARIC\", granted by the Ministry of Agriculture, Directorate of Fisheries, Republic of Croatia (Award No. UP/I-324-01/21-01/385).  
**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.