A Bibliometric Analysis of Bitcoin Scientific Production by Most Relevant Keywords

Abstract

A bibliometric analysis of Bitcoin remains of high importance as it helps to cope with emerging trends. Compared to the existing literature, this paper additionally covers the keywords and analysis of the main topics, provides status-quo information and an insight on the future direction of Bitcoin research. We used VOSviewer to perform a network analysis of the most commonly used keywords in the literature. The results of the network analysis have shown that there are four main cluster groups of keywords in different topics. Also, we used R studio to form a matrix that presented the associations and correlation coefficients between the words most frequently used in combination in abstracts of scientific articles. Bibliography analysis has shown that the main topics dealt with in Bitcoin-related literature in 2020-2021 are volatility, gold, inefficiency, safe-haven, and hedge with a potential future increase of analysis as a safe-haven. By using these results, other researchers could optimize their research by concentrating on a specific topic they are interested in and they can use the relevant keywords we have highlighted for each topic. Furthermore, we have distinguished the most active authors in each field, so that researchers could find potential collaborators in each topic, and we also established the most suitable journals for publishing. Our paper not only optimizes all research processes but also reveals the most relevant topics and identifies future direction.