A Bibliometric Analysis in Industry 4.0 and Advanced Manufacturing: What about the Sustainable Supply Chain?

Abstract

During the last decade, different concepts, methodologies, and technologies have appeared, evolving industry toward what we know today as the fourth industrial evolution or Industry 4.0 (I4.0) and Advanced Manufacturing (AM). Based on both, Supply Chain (SC) is presented as the relevant process that sets the sustainability of manufacturing and, therefore, is defined as a key term in a sustainable approach to I4.0. However, there are no studies that analyze the evolution of science in the fields of I4.0 and AM together. In order to fill this gap, the aim of this research work is to analyze the tendencies of science research related to I4.0 and AM by conducting a bibliometric and network analysis and also to generate a new contribution through the analysis of scientific trends related to SC and Sustainable Supply Chain (SSC) within this scientific context, for the time span 2010–2019. The results show that the number of publications is growing exponentially and the most active countries are Germany and the U.S., with Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule (RWTH) Aachen University being the most productive organization and Tecnologico de Monterrey the most collaborative. The analysis of the scientific terms allows us to conclude that the research field is in a growth phase, generating up to almost 4500 new terms in 2019.

Scientific Mapping of Industry 4.0 Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…Our research findings are consistent with the previous researchers [2], [17] that in terms of the most commonly studied keywords, Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems, Smart Manufacturing, Smart Factories, Big Data, Digitalisation, Sustainable Manufacturing, Additive Manufacturing, Digital Twins, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Cloud Computing are the few which were examined through the visualization of the most common keywords in VOs viewer. Hence, it can be concluded that Industry 4.0 is an emerging research field, providing a gateway for further research, allowing the knowledge generated to be transferred further to assist and encourage novel research in the scientific community.…”

“…It essentially provides a general overview and overall framework of the research topic. In the past several researchers [2], [3], [17][18][19][20] carried out the bibliometric analysis to investigate the trends of industry 4.0 research. Liao et al, [21] underwent a systemic literature review to explore the potential aspects of industry 4.0; field-based researchers; the key lines of research and present research and existing industry initiatives.…”

An Exploratory Bibliometric Analysis of the Birth and Emergence of Industry 5.0

“…Figure 2 shows that publications about Industry 5.0 span a wide and diverse range of subject and research areas. The majority of the publications belong to engineering (45); computer science (40); business, management and accounting (17); social sciences (14) and mathematics (13). In a bibliometric study of Industry 4.0 in the Web of Science, Janik…”

“…Figure 2 shows that publications about Industry 5.0 span a wide and diverse range of subject and research areas. The majority of the publications belong to engineering (45); computer science (40); business, management and accounting (17); social sciences (14) and mathematics (13). In a bibliometric study of Industry 4.0 in the Web of Science, Janik and Ryszko [77] found a relatively similar pattern, with engineering and computer science being the most dominant categories, with 58% and 33% of the records, respectively.…”

“…In this study, we perform an exploratory analysis of the emerging literature on Industry 5.0. While there have been many bibliometric analyses of the much larger Industry 4.0 literature, e.g., [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18], to the best of our knowledge, no similar bibliometric analysis has so far been conducted on Industry 5.0. It is our view that such a study can provide a preliminary picture and overview of the emergence and status of the scientific literature on Industry 5.0.…”