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A bibliometric analysis of blockchain development in industrial digital transformation using CiteSpace

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Abstract

Blockchain technology has the characteristics of distributed storage, peer-to-peer transmission, strong confidentiality, and convenient traceability. It has become an important application for accelerating the industrial digital transformation. After fifteen years of development, blockchain has become well-known to the public and been applied in the digital transformation of many fields. This paper analyzes the origin and development of blockchain, summarizes its attributes in detail, and systematically summarizes the importance of the blockchain in empowering digital transformation. To explore the active research fields and development prospects of blockchain, the analysis data are based on information from papers published from 2015 to 2023 in the core collection of the Web of Science database, which were analyzed by CiteSpace V6.2.R4. The software depicts blockchain literature information, such as main authors, published institutions, active research fields, and evolutionary trends, using knowledge maps. The advantages of blockchain are security, privacy, and the ability to create smart contracts and consensus mechanisms, and it has been applied to digital transformation in fields such as financial transactions, supply chains, and the Internet of Things management. This paper also discusses the high-level applications of blockchain in cutting-edge fields such as smart grids, e-healthcare, the Internet of Vehicles, and machine learning. The paper draws conclusions and implications from the findings and argues that, to accelerate the digital transformation of industry, it is necessary to adhere to the technological innovation of the blockchain and expand its application scope. Regulatory agencies and industrial associations must also strengthen their supervision and cooperation to ensure the safe and effective promotion of sustainable development in the digital economy.

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Data availability

All data sets generated and analyzed during the current study are available in the github.com repository (https://github.com/ws8228/blockchain.git), and also are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Funding

This work is jointly supported by the National Social Science Fund of China (20BGL176), and Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (ZR2020MG046).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Business Administration, Shandong University of Finance and Economics, Jinan, 250014, China

    Xin Su, Shengwen Wang & Renzhu Yu

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  1. Xin Su
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Contributions

Conceptualization, X.S.; methodology, S.W; software, S.W. and R.Y.; formal analysis, X.S., S.W. and R.Y.; data collection, S.W. and R.Y.; writing-original draft preparation, X.S. and S.W.; writing-review and editing, S.W. and R.Y.; supervision, S.W. and R.Y. The authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Shengwen Wang.

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Su, X., Wang, S. & Yu, R. A bibliometric analysis of blockchain development in industrial digital transformation using CiteSpace. Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. 17, 739–755 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-023-01613-7

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