A Decade of Publications on Smart Cities: A Bibliometric Perspective

Abstract

This study presents a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of scholarly publications on smart cities with the aim of examining the intellectual structure, thematic evolution, and collaborative patterns within this rapidly expanding research domain. Despite the growing volume of smart cities literature, existing studies often remain fragmented, making it difficult to obtain a systematic understanding of dominant research themes, methodological orientations, and global knowledge production trends. To address this gap, this study employed a structured bibliometric methodology based on data retrieved through advanced searching in the Scopus database, resulting in a final dataset of 718 relevant publications. Descriptive statistics and preliminary trend analyses were conducted using the Scopus analyser to examine publication growth, subject area distribution, and citation patterns. OpenRefine was subsequently utilised to clean, standardise, and harmonise bibliographic records, ensuring consistency in author names, keywords, and institutional affiliations. VOSviewer was then applied to visualise co-occurrence networks of author keywords and co-authorship collaboration patterns, enabling the identification of major research clusters and international collaboration structures. The findings reveal that smart cities research is anchored around core themes such as sustainability, urban development, governance, and information and communication technologies, with emerging emphasis on artificial intelligence, internet of things, and data driven decision making. The numerical results further indicate strong international collaboration led by countries in Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific. Overall, this study contributes to the body of knowledge by providing a structured and integrative overview of smart cities research, offering valuable insights for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners seeking to understand research trends, identify gaps, and inform future research directions.