Abstract:
This paper applies bibliometric analysis, following the PRISMA 2020 protocol, to map the scholarly
literature on international cooperation involving the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and,
separately, the literature on Vietnam's international cooperation more broadly, in order to identify the
extent to which the bilateral relationship between the two has been examined as an independent object
of study. Data were drawn from Scopus, restricted to the Social Sciences and Multidisciplinary subject
areas, using two mandatory keyword groups combined with a fixed set of international-cooperation
terms. After screening, the dataset comprised 280 documents on IAEA-related international
cooperation and 2,615 documents on Vietnam's international cooperation, of which only three
documents addressed both subjects simultaneously. Performance analysis was carried out with
Biblioshiny and science mapping with VOSviewer. The results show that publications on Vietnam's
international cooperation substantially outnumber and grow faster than those on IAEA cooperation,
and that keyword co-occurrence networks for the two bodies of literature are almost entirely disjoint:
Vietnam-related research clusters around climate change, higher education, and sustainable
development, while IAEA-related research clusters around safeguards, sanctions, non-proliferation,
and nuclear security, with nuclear energy virtually absent from Vietnam's central keyword clusters.
Content analysis of the three overlapping documents, supplemented by one additional technical study
located through targeted search, shows that existing work referencing both Vietnam and the IAEA
consists of technical or legal reports on specific cooperation projects rather than analyses of the
cooperative relationship itself. These findings identify a clear and largely unaddressed research gap
regarding Vietnam–IAEA cooperation as a distinct subject of international relations research. |
