Chapter 4 - Revealing the main development paths of smart cities

Abstract

This chapter reports on a second bibliometric analysis in which two hybrid techniques are combined, which allow clusters of related documents obtained from a co-citation analysis to be labeled using textual data. The aim of this bibliometric study, which continues the analysis of the first two decades of research on smart city development, is to (1) visualize the network of publications shaping the overall intellectual structure of the smart city research field by considering the period between 1992 and 2012, (2) map the clusters of thematically related publications, and (3) reveal the emerging development paths that each thematic cluster represents and strategic principles they embody. The findings demonstrate that the emerging development paths of smart cities are not only two but five. The development paths that this second analysis uncovers and the strategic principles each of them stands on are then compared by reviewing the most recent literature on smart city development. Overall, this chapter offers a systematic review of the smart city research produced between 1992 and 2018, and it serves to further expose the division within its intellectual structure. A division which is caused by the dichotomous nature of the development paths of smart cities that each thematic cluster relates to.