Imbalance in spatiotemporal analysis of narcotics-related activities: a bibliometric review

The mapping of specific narcotics-related activities and determination of hotspots using spatiotemporal techniques enable the relevant law enforcement agencies to allocate more resources around hotspots rather than diluting manpower to canvas larger areas to conduct anti-narcotics operations. Since the use of spatiotemporal techniques to map narcotics-related activities is practiced globally, it is important to determine how often the techniques have been a core aspect of research methodology in investigating narcotics-related activities. This question can be answered by investigating how impactful the work documented in publications have been to the community by analyzing the following – descriptive summary, distributions of documents, authors’ productivity, core sources of publications, relevant affiliations, top cited documents, collaborations between countries and disproportion in selecting subjects for studies. In this paper, a bibliometric analysis of 323 documents in the Scopus database is investigated, in which the analysis revealed a 6.28% annual growth rate for the subject publications of which the majority are articles written in English. We further identified 20 “core” sources with one article which was cited a total of 691 times. Our analysis also revealed trends that provided insights into future research directions such as mapping the HIV infection caused by substance misuse as well studying the demography of the offenders. Our study also uncovered a gap that neglects the mapping of substance misuse crime in African countries that although not unexpected, presents a stark disparity in allocated resources. Our findings can be a starting point for strategizing future studies that integrate spatiotemporal analysis to address the increasing complexity of narcotics crimes with the expanding use of new psychoactive substances and the intertwining of substances misuse with public health issues.