Assimilation of the Blockchain

Abstract

Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies represent recent technology innovations which have received increasing academic and industry focused research interest over the past five years. Given this enhanced focus on blockchain research the aim of this study was to coalesce and analyse the extant blockchain research literature via a bibliometric and co-citation network analysis. The reasoning for this is that there exists a research gap from a bibliometric perspective with regards to the application of blockchain in a smart city context. Consequently, this study deployed two research questions which were investigated by carrying out a bibliometric analysis of 905 academic articles which focused on blockchain in the context of smart cities research. This analysis identified the most prominent blockchain smart city research papers and identified the 4 district research categories which are ripe for future study. These future research categories include the technology stack; sustainability, blockchain assimilation and government services. A discussion relating to each future research category is presented.