Internet of Thing (IoT) review of review: Bibliometric overview since its foundation

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) uses embedded sensors and networks to intelligently connect our surrounded objects and improve quality of life. A huge number of review research studies have been published that review previous IoT related research and more recent advances in a wide number of different IoT technologies and applications. However, as yet, there has not been any meta-review conducted to comprehensively analyze all current IoT review publications. The main objective of this survey is to present the research community with an overview and analysis of IoT review studies that have been published so far, and what challenges still remain that need to be addressed in this field. This paper also attempts to report the enabling factors that were identified, as well as the weaknesses and the risk factors in the current published survey papers. First, IoT review publications were classified into eight categories: IoT applications, types, security, data, communication networks, development, protocol standards, and technologies. Second, the bibliometric indicators were used to identify the leading trends in the IoT field. Third, a graphical/spatial mapping of the bibliographic material, journals and author co-citation networks, the bibliometric coupling of countries, and the co-occurrence of keyword network maps were developed from the IoT reviews. The results indicate that IoT applications, technologies, and security categories had the highest number of publications, whereas the IoT data and network categories had the lowest amount of publications, each of them had less than 5.5% of the total. The USA had the highest h-index at 56, the leading country in this field.