The Conceptual System of Additive Manufacturing via a Quantitative-Qualitative Approach: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Additive Manufacturing (AM) applications have expanded to many areas. Whereas review articles portray the current state of knowledge on AM, scientometric studies identify relevant areas, principal authors, trends, and primary contributing sources from a quantitative perspective. Analysis of the AM still needed to comprise numerous scientific documents and include qualitative criteria. Using a vast number of published documents on AM, we propose a systemized approach to explore AM conceptual subsystems and their historical development. We applied our method to 68,676 records published between 1990 and 2021 in the Web of Science based on revised AM historical terms to prevent including documents unrelated to the subject matter. From a temporal perspective, statistical analysis revealed an explainable change in the AM research trend in 2008. A qualitative study of bibliometric maps obtained with the VOSviewer software led us to determine thirteen conceptual subsystems on AM, whose time development also clarified the history of the whole discipline. These conceptual subsystems distribute in four main publication source clusters, whose leading contributing countries are also reported. Restricting this methodology to specific AM conceptual subsystems or extending it to other knowledge areas is straightforward. Besides, the interactive bibliometric maps, accessible online, enable users to explore the AM conceptual system and find the most cited publications for a better depiction of the current state of knowledge on AM in its different areas.