Table 1 Research questions (RQ) and associated methods.

1. What are the descriptive summary, and the distributions of the documents related to spatiotemporal analysis of narcotics-related activities in the aspect of types, languages, and number of authors?

• Tabular descriptive summary which includes number of authors, single authors, annual growth rate, average citations per document, and number of sources.

Table 3

• Tabular distributions based on types, languages, and frequency of authors.

Table 4

Table 5

Table 6

• Annual scientific productions.

Fig. 1

2. How are the authors’ productivity in publishing documents on the spatiotemporal analysis of narcotics-related activities?

• Number of documents (total and fractionalized)

Table 7

• Lotka’s Law

Fig. 2

3. Which platforms publish the greatest number of documents related to spatiotemporal analysis of narcotics-related activities?

• Number of documents

Fig. 3

• Bradford’s Law

Fig. 4

4. What are the top cited documents on spatiotemporal analysis of narcotics-related activities?

• Tabular frequency of total citations from Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar databases.

Table 8

5. How do countries get involved in publishing documents related to spatiotemporal analysis of narcotics-related activities?

• Tabular frequency of total citations, average citations, and collaborations among countries.

Table 9

Fig. 5

6. Which region/country is focused for the spatiotemporal analysis of narcotics-related activities?

• Mapping the region/country of the targeted people and area of study.

Fig. 6(a, b)

7. What is the current research area and what is the future trend of research related to spatiotemporal analysis of narcotics-related activities?

• Word cloud of keywords

Fig. 7

• Thematic evolution

Fig. 8

• Thematic maps

Fig. 9