Meta-review Dataset - Road Freight Transport

# Dataset Description: Meta-Review of Road Freight Transport Research (2021 to 2025)

## 1. Overview

This dataset accompanies the study "Road Freight Transport at the Crossroads: A Meta-review", a PRISMA-guided meta-review of 104 review papers in road freight transport published between 2021 and 2025. The dataset documents the full evidence trail of the systematic review process, from initial database queries through screening and exclusion to the final included corpus, together with completed PRISMA compliance checklists. It enables full reproducibility of the study's selection procedure and supports secondary analyses of the road freight review landscape.

The dataset is organized into three components corresponding to successive stages of the PRISMA workflow: (1) initial identification records from three bibliographic databases, (2) papers excluded during full-text assessment with documented rejection rationale, and (3) the final set of 104 reviews included in the meta-review with thematic classification and bibliographic metadata. Two completed PRISMA 2020 checklists are also provided to document reporting compliance.

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## 2. Research Context and Hypothesis

### 2.1 Problem Statement

Road freight transport is responsible for approximately 40% of total road transport emissions globally, yet the research landscape addressing this challenge is structurally fragmented. Domains that are functionally interdependent (e.g., electrification and grid infrastructure, automation and labor markets, alternative fuels and critical mineral supply chains) are investigated in near-complete isolation, producing unreconciled and sometimes contradictory findings. Despite this fragmentation, no meta-review has attempted a field-wide synthesis of road freight research or assessed the methodological quality of its secondary evidence base.

For more details please read the "description.md" file.