Mapping the knowledge domain of smart-city research: a bibliometric and scientometric analysis

As urbanization continues to accelerate, the number of cities and their growing populations have created problems, such as the congestion and noise related to transportation, the pollution from industry, and the difficulty of disposing of garbage. An emerging urban strategy is to make use of digital technologies and big data to help improve the quality of life of urban residents. In the past decade, more and more researchers have studied smart cities, and the number of literature in this field grows rapidly, making it "big data". With the aim of better understanding the contexts of smart-city research, including the distribution of topics, knowledge bases, and the research frontiers in the field, this paper is based on the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) in the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection, and the method used is that of comprehensive scientometric analysis and knowledge mapping in terms of diversity, time slicing, and dynamics, using VOSviewer and CiteSpace to study the literature in the field. The main research topics can be divided into three areas-"the concepts and elements of the smart city", "the smart city and the Internet of Things", and "the smart city of the future"-through document co-citation analysis. There are four key directions-"research objectives and development-strategy research", "technical-support research", "data-processing and applied research", and "management and applied research"-analyzed using keywords co-occurrence. Finally, the research frontiers are urban-development, sustainable cities, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, integration, undertaken through keyword co-occurrence analysis.