Mapping the Knowledge Domain of Smart-City Research: A Bibliometric and Scientometric Analysis

Remote work and the COVID-19 pandemic: An artificial intelligence-based topic modeling and a future agenda

As remote work has become more common than ever throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, it has drawn special attention from scholars. However, the outcome has been significantly sporadic and fragmented. In our systematic review, we use artificial intelligence-based machine learning tools to examine the relevant extant literature in terms of its dominant topics, diversity, and dynamics. Our results identify-eight research themes: (1) Effect on employees at a personal level, (2) Effect on employees' careers, (3) Family life and gender roles, (4) Health, well-being, and safety, (5) Labor market dynamics, (6) Economic implications, (7) Remote work management, (8) Organizational remote work strategies. With further content analysis, we structure the sporadic research into three overarching categories. Finally, for each category, we offer a detailed agenda for further research.

How the V4 Nations Handle the Idea of Smart Cities

Smart city is a term that includes digital, information, and communication technologies that contribute to increasing the level and quality of life in individual cities. It focuses primarily on the efficient use of existing resources but also on the discovery of new ones, with the goal of lowering energy consumption while also reducing environmental impact and optimizing traffic in specific areas of the city. This concept is increasingly coming to the fore. Thus, the aim of this article was to determine the level of involvement of Slovak, Czech, Polish, and Hungarian authors in solutions for Smart cities using Web of Science data. The analysis of countries that form the Visegrad Four (V4) region reveals how the region ranks compared to other countries that are actively involved in Smart cities based on VosViewer. To map a specific region of countries, it is necessary to first understand the underlying causes of the problem worldwide. Then, the status of the authors, the number of articles and citations, and universities may be actively discussed and graphically depicted for each nation in Visegrad. Based on the discovered results, academics can identify the contributors and institutions that have solved the issue individually or in co-authorships over a long period. The findings provide data for future testing of selected dependencies and a platform for creating a scientific model to rank countries. In addition, the authorities may focus on identified clusters of key areas that are an essential part of Smart cities and provide a higher quality of life in their city for the people.

Global Research Trends on Smart Homes for Older Adults: Bibliometric and Scientometric Analyses

A growing aging population across the world signifies the importance of smart homes equipped with appropriate technology for the safety and health of older adults. Well-designed smart homes can increase the desire of older adults' aging-in-place and bring economic benefits to the country by reducing budgets for care providers. To obtain a structural overview and provide significant insights into the characteristics of smart homes for older adults, this study conducted bibliometric and scientometric analyses. We used the Web of Science Core Collection database, searching for keywords "smart home*", "home automation", or "domotics" with terms related to older adults, resulting in a total of 1408 documents. VOSviewer software was used to map and visualize the documents. The results showed that research on smart homes for older adults began appearing from 1997 and increased steadily, peaking from 2015. The main research areas were technical engineering fields, such as computer science and engineering, telecommunications with minimal research in humanities, social sciences, and design, indicating the necessity to expand research toward a human-centered perspective, age-friendly technology, and convergence study.

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

The concept of smart public governance (SPG) is gaining attention among researchers, policymakers, and practitioners around the world, especially in response to the modernisation of public administration through emerging technologies in both local (smart city) and national (smart government) levels. Spurred by the noticeable lack of understanding of the SPG concept, the paper aims to comprehensively examine the SPG research by considering the characteristic differences between the smart city and smart government concepts. Bibliometric analysis is based on the Scopus database, containing 775 documents published in the last two decades and facilitated by several established and innovative bibliometric approaches. The results reveal the growth of SPG research over time. Despite the smart city concept being the dominant focus in the SPG research, the smart government concept has been becoming more relevant in recent years, as indicated by some prominent documents published in reputable journals like Government Information Quarterly. Moreover, Anglo-Saxon countries are chiefly engaged in SPG research. However, New Zealand and South Korea are identified as countries with a stronger focus on the smart government concept. The results show the smart city concept is connected with several smart-related initiatives (e.g., smart transportation, smart living, smart energy, etc.), while the smart government concept is primarily associated with smart (de)regulation and smart grid. The findings may add to the understanding of the future development of SPG research, on both local and national levels.

A Bibliometric and Visual Analysis of Global Urban Resilience Research in 2011–2020: Development and Hotspots

Urban resilience (UR), which promotes the implementation of resilient cities, has received widespread attention. The purpose of this study is to visualize the knowledge background, research status, and knowledge structure of relevant literatures by using a Citespace based scientometrics survey. The results show that UR is an increasingly popular topic, with 2629 articles published during the study period. (1) The most prolific publications and journals involved in the flourishment of UR research were identified by co-citation. The United States was the most productive contributor, with numerous publications and active institutions. Journal of Cleaner Production, Sustainability, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction were the three most cited journals. (2) Co-occurrence analysis was employed to determine the highly productive keywords, and subject categories in the UR domain, including “environmental science & ecology”, “environmental sciences, “science & technology”, “environmental studies”, “green & sustainable science & technology”, and “water resources”. (3) The diversity of highly cited authors in different countries and regions confirmed the evolution of UR studies. (4) Furthermore, the classification of UR knowledge was performed in the form of clusters and knowledge structure to achieve ten distinct sub-domains (e.g., Urban floods and stormwater management, Urban ecosystem services, Urban landscapes, and Trauma). This study provides an overview of UR research and research topics so that future researchers can identify their research topics and partners.

Mapping Knowledge Domain Analysis in Smart Education Research

Smart education is considered an inevitable choice and an important educational trend development in the Information Age. Smart education development can promote learning opportunities to master high-quality education and lifelong learning. It vigorously promotes sustainable development. A bibliometric analysis was performed to better understand smart education research field knowledge structures and help researchers understand smart education research field characteristics. VOSviewer and CiteSpace were used to analyze 2358 Web of Science core collection articles related to smart education. The articles were dated 2000–2021. This study visually presents a systematic overview of smart education literature research, including the publication outputs, main categories, most influential countries, organizations, journals, and authors, important documents, and research academic trends. Using a series of cooperation analyses, this paper looked at research cooperation among countries and regions, organizations, and authors to build a smart education knowledge structure map. A smart education theoretical framework was proposed based on the literature review. A bibliometric analysis of the existing research results provided useful and innovative suggestions for researchers and practitioners in the field of smart education.

Innovation Trajectories for a Society 5.0

Big Data, the Internet of Things, and robotic and augmented realities are just some of the technologies that belong to Industry 4.0. These technologies improve working conditions and increase productivity and the quality of industry production. However, they can also improve life and society as a whole. A new perspective is oriented towards social well-being and it is called Society 5.0. Industry 4.0 supports the transition to the new society, but other drivers are also needed. To guide the transition, it is necessary to identify the enabling factors that integrate Industry 4.0. A conceptual framework was developed in which these factors were identified through a literature review and the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) methodology. Furthermore, the way in which they relate was evaluated with the help of the interpretive structural modeling (ISM) methodology. The proposed framework fills a research gap, which has not yet consolidated a strategy that includes all aspects of Society 5.0. As a result, the main driver, in addition to technology, is international politics.

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

The concept of smart cities has gained significant momentum in science and policy circles over the past decade. This study aims to provide an overview of the structure and trends in the literature on smart cities. Bibliometric analysis and science mapping techniques using VOSviewer and CiteSpace are used to identify the thematic focus of over 5000 articles indexed in the Web of Science since 1991. In addition to providing insights into the thematic evolution of the field, the three-decade study period is divided into two sub-periods (1991–2015 and 2016–2021). While splitting the dataset into more sub-periods would have been desirable, we decided to only examine two sub-periods as only very few papers have been published until 2010. The annual number of publications has progressively increased since then, with a surge in the annual number of publications observable from 2015 onwards. The thematic analysis showed that the intellectual base of the field has been very limited during the first period, but has expanded significantly since 2015. Over time, some thematic evolutions, such as further attention to linkages to climate change and resilience, and more emphasis on security and privacy issues, have been made. The thematic analysis shows that existing research on smart cities is dominated by either conceptual issues or underlying technical aspects. It is, therefore, essential to do more research on the implementation of smart cities and actual and/or potential contributions of smart cities to solving societal issues. In addition to elaborating on thematic focus, the study also highlights major authors, journals, references, countries, and institutions that have contributed to the development of the smart cities literature.

The Nexus between Big Data and Sustainability: An Analysis of Current Trends and Developments

With the development of technological innovations, Big Data is transforming the socio-economic world, impacting almost every organization and person. The transformations associated with the development of Big Data have important consequences for the sustainability of organizations, regions, and the society as a whole, and as such, they have been specifically addressed by the academic literature focusing on sustainability. Despite its importance, and perhaps because of its rapid emergence, there is a lack of studies dealing with the analysis of this body of literature and its trends. The current research attempts to fill this gap. The study develops a bibliometric and visualization analysis of the literature on the nexus between Big Data and Sustainability. The research analyzes 726 documents on this topic, published until the end of 2020, in the Web of Science Core Collection database through the VOSviewer software. The results indicate the main trends and developments on the topic related to the most cited papers, authors, publications, institutions, and countries. The visualized frameworks, structures and trends are useful for both researchers and practitioners, as they can help them understand the current situation, issues to consider, and main developments on the topic.

Blue Economy and Coastal Tourism: A Comprehensive Visualization Bibliometric Analysis

This paper aims to analyze the scientific production of the blue economy and coastal tourism research fields to identify research topics and publication patterns. Accordingly, bibliometric analysis was selected as a quantitative meta-analysis literature review method. Scopus was the main database for extracting the scientific production in blue economy and coastal tourism. Various bibliometrics analysis techniques were used to analyze 476 and 49 publications in blue economy and coastal tourism, respectively. The main results are summarized as follows: (i) the number of publications in the blue economy scientific sector has increased significantly, and (ii) contrarily, a relatively small body of blue economy literature is concerned with the coastal tourism sector despite its significant role in the blue economy.

Multiple Dimensions of Smart Cities’ Infrastructure: A Review

In recent years, there has been significant focus on smart cities, on how they operate and develop, and on their technical and social challenges. The importance of infrastructure as a major pillar of support in cities, in addition to the rapid developments in smart city research, necessitate an up-to-date review of smart cities’ infrastructure issues and challenges. Traditionally, a majority of studies have focused on traffic control and management, transport network design, smart grid initiatives, IoT (Internet of Things) integration, big data, land use development, and how urbanization processes impact land use in the long run. The work presented herein proposes a novel review framework that analyzes how smart city infrastructure is related to the urbanization process while presenting developments in IoT sensor networks, big data analysis of the generated information, and green construction. A classification framework was proposed to give insights on new initiatives regarding smart city infrastructure through answering the following questions: (i) What are the various dimensions on which smart city infrastructure research focuses? (ii) What are the themes and classes associated with these dimensions? (iii) What are the main shortcomings in current approaches, and what would be a good research agenda for the future? A bibliometric analysis was conducted, presenting cluster maps that can be used to understand different research trends and refine further searches. A bibliographic analysis was then followed, presenting a review of the most relevant studies over the last five years. The method proposed serves to stress where future research into understanding smart systems, their implementation and functionality would be best directed. This research concluded that future research on the topic should conceptualize smart cities as an emergent socio-techno phenomenon.

Active Learning in an Environment of Innovative Training and Sustainability. Mapping of the Conceptual Structure of Research Fronts through a Bibliometric Analysis

The present study seeks to map and visualize up-to-date perspectives of the topic of active learning by analyzing and interpreting the different elements that make up learning ecosystems within the European Higher Education Area. With this aim, scientometric methods were employed to analyze a sample of 474 articles recovered from Web of Science (WoS) during the three-year period between 2018 and 2020. All articles examined the topic of active learning. Keywords (authors’ keywords and ‘keywords plus’) from the manuscripts were examined through co-occurrence analysis in order to establish the conceptual structure of active learning. Among the different trends and emerging topics identified, there is an important presence of topics related to technology applied to the field of education, where digital contexts acquire a preponderant role in current education. These innovative changes focused on the digital updating and exploitation of technology represent a methodological challenge that requires an involvement and commitment to this new space for educational practice by teachers and students.

A Scientometric Review of System Dynamics Applications in Construction Management Research

Construction management can be regarded as a complex and dynamic system. In recent years, system dynamics (SD) has been widely applied to solve the complex and dynamic problems in the construction management. However, there is a lack of a scientometric analysis to investigate SD applications in construction management from an objective perspective. To fill out this research gap, this study retrieved a total of 222 relevant articles from the Scopus database. Then, VOSviewer was employed to analyze the collected literature from five aspects (i.e., co-authorship, published journals, co-occurring keywords, article citations, and regions). Based on the analysis results, four mainstream research themes were identified and discussed, including “risk management”, “waste management”, “energy management”, and “construction productivity”. In addition, future research directions, such as “construction risk allocation in PPP projects”, “evaluating the economic feasibility of construction waste landfilling centers”, “identifying the variables affecting lighting infrastructure energy consumption”, and “assessing construction productivity for technology-intensive activities”, were proposed. The contribution of this study lies in that it helps both scholars and practitioners to solve the complex and dynamic problems in construction management.

The Interaction between Internet, Sustainable Development, and Emergence of Society 5.0

(1) Background: The importance of this article is to analyze the technological developments in the field of the Internet and Internet technologies and to determine their significance for sustainable development, which will result in the emergence of Society 5.0. (2) The authors used automated content analysis for the analysis of 552 articles published in 306 scientific journals indexed by SCII and/or SCI - EXPANDED (Web of Science (WOS) platform). The goal of the research was to present the relationship between the Internet and sustainable development. (3) Results: The results of the analysis show that the top four most important themes in the selected journals were “development”, “information”, “data”, and “business and services”. (4) Conclusions: Our research approach emphasizes the importance of the culmination of scientific innovation with the conceptual, technological and contextual frameworks of the Internet and Internet technology usage and its impact on sustainable development and the emergence of the Society 5.0.

Analysis of Scientific and Press Articles Related to Cultured Meat for a Better Understanding of Its Perception

Cultured meat is presented by its advocates as a good alternative for consumers who want to be more ethically minded but who do not wish to change their diet. This novel food has become an emerging topic in both the scientific field and the press media. From a bibliometric analysis of scientific publications and on a sociometric analysis of the mainstream press, the aim of this study was to identify potential differences between the scientific view and the public perception. This research analyzed the publications indexed by SCI-EXPANDED in the Web of Science Core Collection database owned by Clarivate Analytics, for scientific literature analysis, and indexed by the Factiva database, for the press media. A total of 327 scientific publications were analyzed according to year of publication and country and institution of origin, also including coauthorships, co-citations, and scientific fields' and journals' networks. A knowledge mapping using VOSviewer was used to study the literature in the field. Based on Factiva, 12,900 press articles dealing with artificial meat, mainly in English, have been found through public databases. The main conclusion is that cultured meat is mainly developing in the USA and the UK, with other countries, such as China, observing the trend for potential future applications. Scientific articles seemed initially to focus mainly on technical aspects of artificial meat and more recently on health value, consumer's acceptance, and sustainability. However, the potential environment-friendly effects of this novel food are more and more studied or described in scientific or press articles.

Global Research on Coronaviruses: An R Package

Background

In these trying times, we developed an R package about bibliographic references on coronaviruses. Working with reproducible research principles based on open science, disseminating scientific information, providing easy access to scientific production on this particular issue, and offering a rapid integration in researchers’ workflows may help save time in this race against the virus, notably in terms of public health.

Objective

The goal is to simplify the workflow of interested researchers, with multidisciplinary research in mind. With more than 60,500 medical bibliographic references at the time of publication, this package is among the largest about coronaviruses.

Methods

This package could be of interest to epidemiologists, researchers in scientometrics, biostatisticians, as well as data scientists broadly defined. This package collects references from PubMed and organizes the data in a data frame. We then built functions to sort through this collection of references. Researchers can also integrate the data into their pipeline and implement them in R within their code libraries.

Results

We provide a short use case in this paper based on a bibliometric analysis of the references made available by this package. Classification techniques can also be used to go through the large volume of references and allow researchers to save time on this part of their research. Network analysis can be used to filter the data set. Text mining techniques can also help researchers calculate similarity indices and help them focus on the parts of the literature that are relevant for their research.

Conclusions

This package aims at accelerating research on coronaviruses. Epidemiologists can integrate this package into their workflow. It is also possible to add a machine learning layer on top of this package to model the latest advances in research about coronaviruses, as we update this package daily. It is also the only one of this size, to the best of our knowledge, to be built in the R language.

The Right to the City in the Platform Age: Child-Friendly City and Smart City Premises in Contention

This article sought to develop a critical account of the ever-increasing role of ICTs in cities and urban governance discourses, captured by a growing interest to ‘smarten up’ our cities, for their inclusiveness of citizens more broadly, and that of children, in particular. In revisiting rights-based approaches, it gives particular attention to the (political) premises of two urban concepts, that is, child-friendly cities and smart cities. The focus here is on how these current concepts encompass and direct the make-up of children′s relationship to the city, which brings the question to the fore of ‘whose version is it?’ A predominant provider′s perspective and a normative discourse are revealed which seem to overlook emergent logics of children′s social needs and experiences in the city. It is therefore proposed to revisit and revise our existing ideas, thus critiquing the current potential of the emerging ‘rights-based’ agendas in improving outcomes for children by urging cities to become child-friendly in their smart city ideals.

Sustainable Management of Digital Transformation in Higher Education: Global Research Trends

Digital transformation in the education sector has implied the involvement of sustainable management, in order to adapt to the changes imposed by new technologies. Trends in global research on this topic have been analyzed and studied, during the 1986–2019 period. To achieve this purpose, a bibliometric study of 1590 articles from the Scopus database has been applied. The results provided data on the scientific productivity of authors, journals, institutions, and countries that contribute to the development of this research area. The evidence reveals an exponential trend, with special interest in the last five years. The main categories are Social Sciences and Environmental Science. The most productive journal is Sustainability. The author with more articles is Mulder, from The Hague University of Applied Sciences. The most productive institution is Delft University of Technology. The USA is the country with the most academic publications and international collaborations in its studies. The main keywords used in the articles are “sustainability”, “sustainable development”, “higher education”, “innovation”, “technology”, “environmental technology”, “technological development”, and “environmental management”. Global research has followed a growing trend, with optimal publication levels in recent years.

A Pattern of Collaborative Networking for Enhancing Sustainability of Smart Cities

This paper represents a research response to the current vision on transformations regarding the capacity building of smart cities focused towards sustainability, by addressing the knowledge based urban development and collaborative tools that support the development, dissemination, and use of knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to develop a collaborative pattern of knowledge networking, focusing on sustainability goals within a smart city concept, using the logic of the Complex Adaptive System (CAS). The study was carried out in an innovation cluster in Romania; the Social Network Analysis (SNA) was used as a tool to perform the study. The results of this analysis, due to the suggested networking, have led to delimitation of the roles that Groups of Competences play to enhance the sustainability of smart cities in areas where the use of knowledge has the greatest impact. Results show that the success of the smart solutions’ implementation depends on how the social and competence structures of the network are shaped and whether it permanently adapts to fit the sustainability objectives in the considered areas.