Bibliometric analysis of topic structure in quantum computation and quantum algorithm research

Abstract

We present a bibliometric analysis of the research papers on quantum computation and quantum algorithms published in 1985-2020. We identify three distinct periods from the trend of the annual number of published papers, and show the 20 top contributing countries in each period in terms of the number of publications and the number of total citations. The bibliographic coupling network of the publications in the latest period is characterized as a dense, small-world network with a small diameter, which contains 14 large communities, whose topics are the fabrication of qubits in various physical systems, studies of the quantum algorithms, and other related topics. Quantum machine learning, one of the emerging topics in quantum computation, is found to be the fifth-largest independent community.