This research panoramically and empirically reviews the scientific production on coastal governance studies, mapping global networks of countries, organizations, authors, themes, and journals as referents for this topic. The articles were examined through a bibliometric/scientometric approach based on 2043 articles corpus stored in the Web of Science (JCR), applying the bibliometric laws of Price, Lotka, and Zipf to add further validity to the use of VOSviewer for data and metadata processing. The results highlight an uninterrupted exponential increase in publications since 1991, with a high concentration in 29 countries (21%), 461 organizations (18%), 99 authors (1.45%), and 4 growing journals (1%). The emerging topics observed in the literature are related to coastal sustainability and coastal management. Complementing previous studies on coastal zone management and marine territorial planning, we add coastal systems governance as a topic
