Bibliometrics and Network Analysis of Cryptocurrency Research

Abstract

Cryptocurrency, as an emerging social phenomenon, has attracted great research attentions and starts to form a new research area in the past decade. A thorough review of the existing cryptocurrency literatures helps us to understand the status-quo and the promising research future of this emerging field. This paper provides a systematic review of the cryptocurrency literatures by employing bibliometrics and network analysis methods. A total of 833 publications from Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus have been collected in the time period of January 2008 to June 2018. We examine the descriptive features, countries’ contributions and collaboration networks, author collaboration networks and reference co-citation networks to identify actors with significant influence in this field. The results show that cryptocurrency research is experiencing exponential growth, but scientific collaborations between different countries and authors are still insufficient. The intellectual bases of the cryptocurrency domain rest on the early-year literatures that provide fundamental understandings for cryptocurrency, and that bridge different research fields. The analysis indicates that the current research trend focuses on cryptocurrency market analysis incorporating market behaviors and trading characteristics.