Exploring the evolution trends of port integration policy in China by a text mining approach.

Ports are essential and strategic nodes of international trade and economic activities. The integration of port resources helps enhance the optimal division of port functions to further promote economic development. This paper explores the evolutionary trends of port integration policy from 2011 to 2021 in China through a text-mining approach. We first used the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic analysis method to analyze the port integration policies and summarize the evolutionary trends of port policies. In addition, an association analysis was conducted to explore port integration policies' impacts by examining their relationships among the environmental protection, digitalization level, and port development scale. Our findings suggested that China's port integration policy has evolved from specific and simple to abstract and complicated at the managerial level. Port development has enriched from infrastructure construction to the ideology of economic development. Our findings show that China's port integration is gradually improving the port operation. The findings of the study contribute to the extant literature by analyzing the port integration policy evolution in China and can be referred to by other countries. • Text mining method was used to explore the port integration policy evolution. • Port integration policy evolved from specific and simple to abstract and complicated. • Port development enriched from basic infrastructure to the governance model. • The evolution of port integration policy was related to reducing carbon emissions in the port sector. • The evolution of port integration policy made the ports intelligent in association with digital technology such as big data and AI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]