Autonomous vehicles: scientometric and bibliometric review^*

* This paper is based on Marçal, R., Antonialli, F., Habib, B., De Miranda Neto, A., Alves de Lima, D., Yutaka, J., Luiz, A. and Nicolaï, I. (2017) Autonomous Vehicles: Scientometric and bibliometric studies, Paper presented at the 25th International Colloquium of Gerpisa - R/Evolutions. New technologies and services in the automotive industry, June, Paris, France. https://hal-centralesupelec.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01652939/file/Autonomous_vehicles_Scientometric_and_bibliometric_studies.pdf.

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a scientometric and bibliometric review of the research on autonomous vehicles (AVs) to identify its main characteristics, evolution, and potential trends for future studies. Relevant articles were searched on WoS, yielding a research corpus of 10,580 papers, and the software CiteSpace was subsequently used for analysis. The results showed that AV research is heterogeneous and registered a growing demand over time. Multidisciplinarity is present, with 96 science fields being identified. As in any other sector, it is necessary to understand broader aspects of this industry such as the market factors surrounding it, as well as other economic and managerial issues. In this sense, we observed a migration of the research field from multidisciplinarity to pluridisciplinarity with a greater number of studies focusing on the latter. We understand that terminology standardisation contributes to achieving pluridisciplinarity. As such, it is important to highlight that sustainability, public policies, liability, and safety, as well as business issues such as performance and business models are some of the tendencies in the field of AVs. For future studies, we suggest a more in-depth analysis of publications in terms of individual search terms, as well as the sub-areas identified as trends in this paper.

KEYWORDS:

• utonomous vehicles
• bibliometrics
• scientometrics
• review
• CiteSpace

Acknowledgement

This paper would not have been possible without the support of the Post Graduate Program in Administration of Federal University of Lavras (UFLA – Brazil), Terrestrial Mobility Laboratory (LMT / UFLA – Brazil), and the Laboratoire Génie Industriel (LGI / Centrale Supélec – France). We also would like to thank the institutions that have been funding this project: Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa de Minas Gerais (Fapemig – Brazil), Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES – Brazil) and Ecole Centrale Supélec (Université Paris-Saclay).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Rodrigo Marçal Gandia http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9551-153X

Notes

* This paper is based on Marçal, R., Antonialli, F., Habib, B., De Miranda Neto, A., Alves de Lima, D., Yutaka, J., Luiz, A. and Nicolaï, I. (2017) Autonomous Vehicles: Scientometric and bibliometric studies, Paper presented at the 25th International Colloquium of Gerpisa - R/Evolutions. New technologies and services in the automotive industry, June, Paris, France. https://hal-centralesupelec.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01652939/file/Autonomous_vehicles_Scientometric_and_bibliometric_studies.pdf.

1. The Boolean operator underline “_” was used to ensure the search yielded only the results in which the pair of words appeared together. Terms were only searched in the singular form, as this would find both singular and plural terms.

2. For electric vehicle data, the articles were searched on the WoS database in a single search using the Boolean operator “AND” and were selected by the following terms in the title, abstract, or keywords: electric_vehicle* AND car, for a total of 4,148 papers.