Abstract
Blockchain as emerging technology is revolutionizing several industries, and its abundant privileges have opened up a bunch of research directions in various industries; thereby, it has acquired many interests from the research community. The rapid evolution of blockchain research papers in recent years has resulted in a need to conduct research studies that investigate a detailed analysis of the current body of knowledge in this field. To address this need, a few review papers have been published to report the latest accomplishments and challenges of blockchain technology from different perspectives. Nonetheless, there has not been any bibliometric analysis of the state of the art in blockchain where Web of Science (WoS) has been taken into consideration as a literature database. Hence, a thorough analysis of the current body of knowledge in blockchain research through a bibliometric study would be needed. In this paper, we performed a bibliometric analysis of all Blockchain's conference papers, articles, and review papers that have been indexed byWoS from 2013 to 2018. We have analyzed those collected papers against five research questions. The results revealed some valuable insights, including yearly publications and citations trends, hottest research areas, top-ten influential papers, favorite publication venues, and most supportive funding bodies. The findings of this paper offer several implications that can be used as a guideline by both fresh and experienced researchers to establish a baseline before initiating a blockchain research project in the future.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 8628982 |
| Pages (from-to) | 19212-19221 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Journal | IEEE Access |
| Volume | 7 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 29 Jan 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Open Access journalCopyright © and Moral Rights are retained by the author(s) and/ or other copyright owners. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This item cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder(s). The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.
Funding
Among all 995 papers we analyzed in this research, National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) has supported the most number of papers with 100 papers. Then, 36 papers have been supported by National Key Research and Development Program of China while National Science Foundation of USA (NSF) has supported 15 papers. Fig. 6 represents the detailed information about the supportive funding organizations. We also evaluated those funding agencies based on total number of citations that their supported papers received. Accordingly, as shown in Fig. 6, papers that were supported by NSFC have received more citations, i.e. 177 citations, compared to the others. The observations regarding the topmost funding organizations imply that China has proven itself as one of the major investing countries on Blockchain research studies. The quality of Blockchain researches, which were supported by Chinese funding bodies, especially NSFC, is affirmed according to the number of citations they received compared to other funding agencies. Such kind of information would quite useful for researchers and practitioners who are interested to apply for a Blockchain-related position. It can also give directions to the university professors before lodging a grant application. Analysis of results extracted from the bibliometric study indicated that researchers have shifted their research interests from Bitcoin to Blockchain in the recent past two years. To complement this, the number of citations to Blockchain papers has been also growing drastically since 2017 and most probably, this incremental trend would be continuing in the next years as well. Four research areas, namely Computer Science, Engineering, Telecommunications and Business Economics, have been covered by most of the Blockchain papers. Based on our findings, the most cited paper titled ‘‘Blockchains and Smart Contracts for the Internet of Things’’ written by Konstantinos Ch. and Michael D. was published in 2016 in the journal of IEEE Access. This paper has also received the highest average citations per year. Lecture Notes in Computer Science and IEEE Access have shown themselves as the most popular venues, based on total number of publications, for publishing the latest advancements in the Blockchain area. However, Blockchain papers published in IEEE Access have impressed the research community more than others as they received the highest number of citations. The results indicated that National Natural Science Foundation of China has made sound investments on Blockchain research by supporting the highest number of papers indexed in WoS.
Keywords
- Bibliometric study
- Blockchain
- Web of Science
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Computer Science
- General Materials Science
- General Engineering