The scientometrics of literature on smart cities

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the research trends in smart cities (SCs) in order to demonstrate the most and the least active fields, researchers, institutions, frontier active centers/authors and funding institutions, as well as drawing the map of the most active countries in this scope. Design/methodology/approach Bibliometric data of 4,696 scientific works were collected from Web of Science, one of the most authentic bibliometric databases, within 1970–2018. The data were analyzed using scientometrics and content analysis methods and visualized by tables, charts and atlases. Findings The results showed an increasing trend in these studies mostly published as conference papers during 48 years. In this period, 0.6 percent of the papers got more than ten citations. Highly cited fields in the area of SCs were orderly smart IT infrastructure, smart government, smart environment, smart mobility, smart energy, smart economy and smart citizen. The geographic atlas of SC studies showed that the frontier countries in SCs were China, Spain and Italy, orderly. China’s main focus was on smart infrastructure while Spain’s focus was smart citizens and smart energy. Italy’s studies were mostly concentrated on smart government, smart mobility and smart environment. In general, it can be concluded that “smart IT infrastructure” was the most noted among the other components of SCs. Originality/value The scientometrics of SC literature has been conducted for the first time.

Three Decades of Research on Smart Cities: Mapping Knowledge Structure and Trends

“…In this way, bibliometric analysis studies can complement traditional systematic reviews. There are several generic bibliometric studies on smart cities research [44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51]. These studies have improved our understanding of the overall landscape of the field, and interestingly point out similarities between some concepts, particularly regarding the 'intelligent city', and the 'smart city'; where the former focusses on systems design, without necessarily engaging in heavy utilization of technology.…”

Bibliometric Analysis of Smart Public Governance Research: Smart City and Smart Government in Comparative Perspective

“…The first bibliometric smart city analysis that year by Zhao et al (2019) argued that after 2014 rapid development was observed in the smart city field. The authors maintain that Sustainability, Sustainable Cities Soc., and Cities emerged as core journals among smart city documents, as determined by another bibliometric study in the same year (Guo et al 2019) Further, China, the USA, Spain, and Italy were recognised as top countries with the highest number of publications ranked by several bibliometric studies (for instance Wamba and Queiroz 2019;Zhao et al 2019;Guo et al 2019;Moradi 2019). In addition, Zhao et al (2019) place smart city research documents into three clusters, where one cluster represents the pros and cons of smart city development in the future.…”

“…For Latin American countries, the rise of smart cities began in 2013, the year we also determined in our bibliometric analysis to be when the rapid growth of the SPG documents started. Another bibliometric study in the same year discovered that the scientific community in the smart city research field had tended to concentrate on the seven focus areas: the economy, environment, information technology, Internet of Things, smart governance, smart citizens, and transportation (Moradi 2019). Finally, a 2019 bibliometric analysis by Parlina et al (2019) investigates Indonesian institutes' smart city research field.…”

Past, present, future: Engagement with sustainable urban development through 35 city labels in the scientific literature 1990–2019

“…This study extends recent bibliometrics research into the significance of different city categories in three new directions: first, it takes a comprehensive approach encompassing 35 city labels, allowing for direct comparison and consideration of their singular and joint contributions to conceptualising sustainable urban development. This contrasts with bibliometrics on individual categories, such as 'sustainable city' (Perea-Moreno et al 2018), 'eco city' (Li et al 2019;Türkeli et al 2018), 'creative city' (Rodrigues and Franco, 2019;Lazzaretti et al 2017) and, reflecting surging interest, especially 'smart city' (Zheng et al 2020;Guo et al 2019;Dominguez and Sanguino 2019;Corsini et al 2019;Mora et al 2019;Li 2019;Winkowska et al, 2019;Fernandes et al 2019;Tiwari et al 2019;Moradi, 2019;Li 2019;Waheed et al 2018;Muhamedyev et al 2018;Komninos and Mora 2018;Tomaszesska and Florea 2018;Duran et al 2018;Alcaide-Munoz et al 2017;Mora et al 2017;Zheng et al 2020). Notably, so far only three studies have followed a comparative perspective, juxtaposing five (Fu and Zhang, 2017), seven (Wang et al 2019) and twelve (De Jong et al 2015) categories, respectively.…”