Current Trends in IoT Research

Recently, IoT has gained a lot of attention by the academia and the industry, and many research papers have been published in this area in the last years. While several papers offer thorough literature reviews on IoT studies, there exist a lack of literature that would show the research trends by applying bibliometric approach. Thus, to reveal the current knowledge structure and study areas in IoT research, presented study first defines the IoT concept and provides a literature review on published papers in this field. Next, it extracts the relevant recent IoT publications, indexed in the Web of Science database, and implements the co-occurrence analysis, which is a type of co-word bibliometric analysis, to determine the terms that co-occur in the selected papers. A special bibliometric software was used to identify the relationships among the main terms. The results revealed three cluster that are graphically presented and explained to reflect the current research nexus in the IoT field. Being a starting point of a broader research, this study enhances the existing body of knowledge in tacked area by applying bibliometric analysis and provides theoretical underpinnings for a better understanding of the current state and trends in IoT research as well as it offers methodological support for using bibliometric methods in similar future studies.