Scientific Mapping of Industry 4.0 Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

The fourth industrial revolution is progressing very rapidly. This research aims to investigate the research patterns and trends of industry 4.0 research with a focus on manufacturing. This bibliometric analysis is performed on data of the past five years (2016 to 2020) retrieved from the Scopus database. This research is conducted on 1426 articles in which the top productive countries, authors, institutions, and most cited articles were investigated. Findings demonstrated that Italy, the United States, and China are the most active countries in terms of research publications. South China University of Technology (China) has been identified as the most productive institution.  Wan, J., Li, D., Rauch, E. were found to be the most productive authors. Industry 4.0 is primarily focused on the fields of engineering and computer science and sustainability is the most prolific journal. Co-occurrence analysis of keywords, co-authorship analysis of authors and countries were carried out along with bibliographic coupling of documents using VoS viewer which is the most common information visualisation software. This article summarises the growth of Industry 4.0 in the past five years and gives a short overview of the related works and applications of Industry 4.0.