Abstract
Over the last three decades, many studies have been conducted on smart cities. Studies range from enhancing the quality of life for citizens to boosting the local economy, improving transportation and traffic management, increasing environmental awareness, and improving citizen and business interactions with the government. Due to the importance of smart cities to various stakeholders and the associated benefits and challenges of implementation, the smart city concept has garnered significant attention from researchers across various disciplines. The growing number of publications necessitates a systematic and comprehensive examination of smart city research. This paper aims to sketch out a research landscape, as a systematic understanding of smart cities is still lacking. A bibliometric analysis of 4760 papers collected from the Web of Science (WOS) is used to determine the publication year, country, source, institution, and keyword co-occurrence. The subfields of smart city research are identified and evaluated based on co-citation analysis and the application of the research potential evaluation (RPE) model. Additionally, the study employs the main path analysis (MPA) method to visually analyze the literature’s development trend and citation network and examine the knowledge diffusion associated with smart city research. The keyword clustering and MPA results indicate that smart city research is primarily focused on sustainability and governance, new technologies (e.g., the internet of things, blockchain, new computing paradigms and artificial intelligence), smart energy, transportation, and interactive applications. Six subfields of smart city research are identified, including Industry 4.0 technologies, digital twin technologies, smart tourism, smart city governance, smart city conceptualization and implementation, and sustainability. Industry 4.0 technologies and sustainability represent the two key subfields with the highest number of publications among these subfields. Based on the results of the RPE model, the theme of Industry 4.0 technologies has the strongest development potential and has stayed a popular topic over the past few years. Through MPA, we also observed a recent trend towards examining how artificial intelligence and open data platforms contribute to smart cities. By combining bibliometrics and MPA, we better understood the current state of smart city research and identified future directions for the field.
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Rejeb, A., Rejeb, K., Abdollahi, A. et al. Smart city research: a bibliometric and main path analysis. J. of Data, Inf. and Manag. 4, 343–370 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42488-022-00084-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42488-022-00084-4