Abstract
There have been many attempts to transform cities into smart cities worldwide. However, it is difficult to understand and describe smart cities from different perspectives, given the widespread application of the concept of smart city in diverse disciplines, such as urban planning, electronic engineering, and computer sciences. This work conducted a comprehensive smart city literature review based on text mining of 3,315 papers on smart cities published in journals indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index databases. These include “all papers” classified as research articles published from 1999 to April 2020. Our findings show the state of the art of research on smart cities, including (i) smart city literature statistics from 1999 to 2019, (ii) 23 research topics related to smart cities, and (iii) geographical variations in smart-city research. Based on these findings, we offer theoretical and practical implications of (1) missing fields of studies, (2) future research directions, and (3) the applicability of text-mining techniques to literature reviews. We believe that this work, which aims to establish a common ground for understanding smart cities from multiple disciplinary perspectives, will encourage further research and development regarding smart cities.
Highlights
With the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IOT) technology, the idea of smart cities is attracting attention as a new growth engine and development strategy in many global cities
We identified and downloaded journal papers related to smart cities from the Web of Science Core Collection databases of the Science Cita tion Index Expanded (SCIE) (1945–) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) (1987–) using the two queries of {TOPIC: (“smart city”)} and {TOPIC: (“smart cities”)}
The trends of smart city research topics in recent years are analyzed focusing on these 23 topics, and the evolution of smart city research is discussed
Summary
With the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IOT) technology, the idea of smart cities is attracting attention as a new growth engine and development strategy in many global cities. Many cities are introducing new urban services, using information and communications technology (ICT) to build smart cities that improve the quality of life of citizens. What are the major smart city research areas and how are they related? What are the key technological factors of smart cities? A comprehensive review of smart cities across different fields may facilitate smart city planning and development. Such inte grative work is not easy to achieve because of the variety and volume of studies and applications related to smart cities. One of the commonly applied methodologies for integrative work is the bibliometric approach, which allows to identify how a specific concept or research discipline is formulated and how it correlates with other concepts by clarifying the relationships between all the concepts (Kalmaski and Kirby, 2012)
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