Bibliometric Mining of Research Trends for Smart Cities

Using a novel method and tool in the form of a Python program, we present a bibliometric study based on 46,937 documents related to smart cities from the Scopus database. The study identifies important research directions and trends during the time period 2014 to 2023. We also present the growth of smart city research for five geographic regions. Citation analysis for research directions and regions is also performed. The results show that smart city research in general stopped growing around 2019. However, some research directions are still growing, e.g., smart city research related to machine learning and AI. India is the only geographic region where smart city research still is growing. We also see that the number of citations of a smart city document from North America is on average a factor 3.74 larger than the number of citations to a document from India.