Abstract
The advent and development of digital technologies has had a significant impact on the establishment of contracts. Smart contracts are designed as computer code containing instructions for executing user agreements, offering a technologically secure solution with numerous advantages and applications. However, smart contracts are not without their problems when we try to fit them into the traditional system of contract law, and their presumed benefits can become shortcomings. Bibliometric studies can help to assess the current state of science in a specific subject and support decision making and research direction. Here, this bibliometric study is used to analyze global trend research in relation to this novel contractual methodology, the smart contract, which seems to have experienced exponential growth since 2014. Specially, this analysis was focused on the main countries involved and the institutions that lead this research worldwide. On the other hand, the indexations of these works are analyzed according to major scientific areas and the keywords of all the works, to detect the subjects to which they are grouped. Community detection has been used to establish the relationship between countries researching in this area, and six clusters have been identified, around which all the work related to this topic is grouped. This work shows the temporal evolution of research related to smart contracts, highlighting that there are two trends—e-commerce and smart power grids. From the perspective of driving sustainability, smart contracts could provide a contribution in the near future.
Highlights
A contract is where individuals, groups, companies, institutions, and even governments enter into an agreement, where each of them is committed to fulfilling certain conditions
Smart contracts are not without their problems when we try to fit them into the traditional system of contract law, and their presumed benefits can become shortcomings
Community detection has been used to establish the relationship between countries researching in this area, and six clusters have been identified, around which all the work related to this topic is grouped
Summary
A contract is where individuals, groups, companies, institutions, and even governments enter into an agreement, where each of them is committed to fulfilling certain conditions. The main differences between smart and traditional contracts are the ways they are written, their legal implications, and how the agreed conditions will be fulfilled These distinctive characteristics are the ones that provide the advantages and disadvantages of both types of contracts, which are observable when understanding how they work. Reimbursement in specific, narrowly defined loss scenarios, much more clearly provide a similar highly specialized institutional context comparable to the existing generally used self-executory contracts, such as on demand guarantees This new technology has its advantages and disadvantages. The importance of bibliometric studies is carried out in all branches of science, such environment [32] and education [33] In this context, the present work has the main objective of analyzing the global research trends on smart contracts, with special attention to analyzing the main areas in which efforts are being made by the scientific community
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