Abstract
This article presents a bibliometric analysis of scientific publications investigating technological megatrends at the societal level, through the parallel analysis of 549 documents from Scopus and 291 documents in Web of Science (WoS) using the VOSviewer software and the Excel component of the MS Office 365 package. The main purpose of this study was to obtain an overview of the evolution of the research on the subject of technological megatrends from the perspective of interest, domains, geographical areas, sources, authors and cocitation networks, research clusters of countries, and cluster-related concepts. The results showed that publications on technological megatrends started in 1982, but from a scientific point of view they started in 1983 (Scopus) and 1984 (WoS), and that they display an increasing trend after 2010. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Nature, SAE Technical Papers, VDI Berichte, Harvard Business Review, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, and Sustainability represent the most important sources, and Gibbs, Kraemer, Dedrick, Kim, Chmiela, Sauceda, Müller, Tkatchenko, Pratt, Sarmiento, Montes, Ogilvie, Marcus, Perez, Brownson, D. Mourtzis, M. Doukas, and Bernidaki are the most notorious researchers in the field. At the societal level, technological megatrends are closely related to foresight, globalization, industry 4.0, the internet of things, digitalization, technology, artificial intelligence, innovation, the future, and sustainability. This study is original and useful for researchers in the context of the lack of similar studies on this subject.
Highlights
IntroductionAs suggested by Taylor [3] in his attempt to formulate a theory of change, the rapid changes of global society generate opportunities and threats that can be managed properly only if they are approached from a predictive perspective
In the context of continuous change at the societal level, highlighted with predilection at the beginning of the 21st century [1] as a characteristic of contemporary society, which requires the efficient management of the resultant opportunities and threats on a global scale [3] in a predictive manner, our research focused on the idea of bibliographically mapping the literature associated with the concept of societal technological megatrends, beginning with the emergence of the concept of megatrends in 1982 [17] and ending in Digital transformation, digitalization, ecosystems, industry 4.0, internet of things, smart city, trends, virtual reality
Through the answers formulated for the eight research questions, we detected that our research objective, namely, to perform a bibliometric analysis of technological megatrends at the societal level, had been met and that a bibliographic mapping of the scientific research in the field of megatrends had been achieved, which meant that we gained an overview of this topical issue which is of great importance at the societal level
Summary
As suggested by Taylor [3] in his attempt to formulate a theory of change, the rapid changes of global society generate opportunities and threats that can be managed properly only if they are approached from a predictive perspective These concerns, which have been highlighted for thousands of years in China through books and guides dedicated to change [4], have reached a high level of accuracy over time and constitute the basis for numerous academic studies, as well as numerous special reports of renowned consulting firms, such as PricewaterhouseCoopers [5], Deloitte [6], McKinsey [7], and Gartner [8]. We would like to highlight the fact that some concerns in this field were meant to shape an increasingly
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