A review of studies on service quality of intermediate public transport

Intermediate public transport (IPT) or paratransit is an indispensable part of the transportation system in low and middle-income countries. This paper presents the state-of-the-art research advances in the domain of paratransit service quality evaluation through the use of systematic bibliographic analysis. The annual production rate of publication in this sector is 17.88%, which indicates the growing intensity of research activity in this subject and thus justifies the need to perform a thorough review of available literature. This holistic approach is aimed at providing comprehensive information on paratransit research areas, the citation networks, along with the contribution of different countries. All pertinent research studies published in Scopus until 2021 are analyzed to acquire research status in this domain. For the extraction of valuable knowledge from the archives of large-scale literature, the co-occurrence and the co-citation networks of concurrence are constructed. Visualizing the bibliographic network gives a clear understanding of the extent of the literature available, areas of expertise, and research trends. The comprehensive analysis of the shortlisted documents led to the identification of various sub-sectors of the research field, types of paratransit vehicles, and research methodologies adopted by different scholars to evaluate service quality. The research gap thus identified is that despite acknowledging the importance of IPT and its vital role in many developing countries, very few research studies have been conducted to evaluate its service quality. The significant findings through an in-depth review provide ways for the scope of future work.