From digital to sustainable: A scientometric review of smart city literature between 1990 and 2019

In recent years, smart city (SC) has attracted increasing attention from both academia and industry due to a mix of urbanization, informatization, and globalization. Although several literature reviews of SC research have been conducted, there still appears to be a lack of systematic quantitative and visual investigation and multidisciplinary scrutiny of the structure and evolution of this field. This paper conducts a scientometric review of the progressively synthesized network derived from 7840 bibliographic records from a topic search on SC in the period 1990–2019. Using CiteSpace, co-occurrence analysis of categories is conducted to explore the evolution of the disciplines engaged in SC research; co-word analysis of the keywords and document co-citation analysis associated with cluster analysis are further performed to reveal the development paths and research topics in terms of burst terms, text and citation-based clusters, citation structure, and pivotal points in the field. These scientometric techniques are combined to: (1) reveal the intellectual division of this developing field using a visual and comprehensive approach, (2) identify in chronological order the 10 core research sub-topics in this area with burst references and terms, (3) identify Internet of Things, big data, and fog computing as the most promising technologies for SC planning and development, and (4) conclude that smart sustainable cities and sustainable smart cities are the two emerging trends in the domain. Overall, this paper provides a visual, quantitative, and longitudinal large-scale review of the most recent literature on SC research, providing a broad overview and system thinking for researchers and practitioners with respect to SC.