Blockchain technology in the smart city: a bibliometric review

Abstract

Blockchain can function as a foundational technology with numerous applications in smart cities. The objective of this paper is twofold. First, it provides a detailed overview of the extant literature on blockchain applications in smart cities; second, it reveals the trends and suggests future research directions for scholars who wish to contribute to this rapidly growing field. We conducted a bibliometric review using a keyword co-occurrence network and article co-citation analysis. The analysis includes the assessment of 148 articles published between 2016 and 2020 in 76 academic journals. The review results demonstrate that the number of articles devoted to the study of blockchain applications and smart cities has increased exponentially in recent years. More importantly, the research identifies some of the most influential studies in this area. The paper discusses trends and highlights the challenges related to the deployment of blockchain in smart cities. To the authors’ best knowledge, this represents the first study to review the literature from leading journals on blockchain applications in smart cities using bibliometric techniques.

Fostering the Circular Economy with Blockchain Technology: Insights from a Bibliometric Approach

“…Other technical challenges include high development costs and limited scalability; all of those are also largely mentioned in researches [ 119 ]. Moreover, the lack of technical understanding of BT by users and companies in order to use it for the CE was an addressed obstacle in the researches under investigation [ 21 ].…”

Examining Knowledge Diffusion in the Circular Economy Domain: a Main Path Analysis

“…To gain a deep understanding of CE research, we generated a keyword co-occurrence network. Like co-citation networks, a keyword co-occurrence network reveals the respective relationships between co-occurring keywords [ 135 , 137 ]. According to Su and Lee [ 156 ], a keyword co-occurrence network analysis helps researchers identify research topics and detect the hotspots or research frontiers in a given scientific field.…”

“…According to Su and Lee [ 156 ], a keyword co-occurrence network analysis helps researchers identify research topics and detect the hotspots or research frontiers in a given scientific field. In the network, a pair of keywords have a closer relationship if they co-occur in the same articles more frequently [ 135 , 137 ]. By conducting this analysis, we aim to analyse the core content from the used keywords and portray the present structure of CE research.…”

Municipal Cybersecurity—A Neglected Research Area? A Survey of Current Research

“…Paul et al [13] proposes a smart access control framework in a public and a private blockchain for smart city applications, taking into account the need for low resource consumption for IoT devices in the smart city. The authors of [14] conducted a bibliometric review of literature on blockchain in the context of smart cities, identifying key research and influential studies. They identified research in key areas such as the use of IoT for security in sensor data collection, privacy for machine learning, smart contracts for transparent and reliable data sharing, and blockchain use for empowering smart communities and fostering sustainability in smart cities.…”