3-D Printing Technologies From Infancy to Recent Times: A Scientometric Review

The three-dimensional (3-D) printing technology field is rapidly evolving and being adopted worldwide for a broad spectrum of applications in interdisciplinary research. A periodic critical quantitative assessment of the research domain is essential to unleashing various domains, research areas, and technological trends in the 3-D printing technology domain. CiteSpace—a scientific information measurement software—is used for scientometric analysis to understand the development of 3-D printing technology, viz., its evolution, status quo, and exploring the hidden internal connections between the work of literature. This article presents a cocitation analysis of participating nations, authored documents, scientific contributors, journals, and co-occurrence analysis of keywords on 37445 extracted Scopus indexed scientific literature. Further, a timeline review of keywords pinpoints the hotspots and research trends. This article identifies the research frontiers, hotspots, and potential future research directives in this research domain.