A new paper “Three Decades of Research on Smart Cities‘ by Ayyoob Sharifi, Zaheer Allam, Bakhtiar Feizizadeh, and Hessam Ghamari, published in Sustainability 2021, 13, 7140, gives an overview of the structure and trends in the literature on smart cities. It is a bibliometric analysis and science mapping using VOSviewer and CiteSpace to identify the thematic focus of over 5000 articles indexed in the Web of Science.
The review documents that few papers have been published until 2010 but the annual number of publications has progressively increased from 2015 onwards. A thematic analysis shows that existing research on smart cities falls into three clusters represented by red, blue, and green nodes: (a) concepts, processes, city change, (b) data, modelling, optimisation, (c) Internet-of-Things, cloud, and other technologies.
In addition to thematic focus analysis, “the study also highlights major authors, journals, references, countries, and institutions that have contributed to the development of the smart cities literature’. Glad to see so many colleagues we have worked with over the last 10 years (Hans Schaffers, Tan Yigitcanlar, Luca Mora, Mark Deakin, Peter Nijkamp, Margarita Angelidou, Karima Kourtit) on the list of influential authors or papers.
The paper: Three_Decades_of_Research_on_Smart_Cities
Annex: Supplementary File