The First Two Decades of Smart-City Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on the first two decades of research on smart cities by conducting a bibliometric analysis of the literature published between 1992 and 2012. The analysis shows that smart-city research is fragmented and lacks cohesion, and its growth follows two main development paths. The first one is based on the peer-reviewed publications produced by European universities, which support a holistic perspective on smart cities. The second path, instead, stands on the gray literature produced by the American business community and relates to a techno-centric understanding of the subject. Divided along such paths, the future development of this new and promising field of research risks being undermined. For while the bibliometric analysis indicates that smart cities are emerging as a fast-growing topic of scientific enquiry, much of the knowledge that is generated about them is singularly technological in nature. In that sense, lacking the social intelligence, cultural artifacts, and environmental attributes, which are needed for the ICT-related urban innovation that such research champions.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart-city research
• urban innovation
• bibliometric analysis
• development paths
• corporate model
• holistic interpretation

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Luca Mora, Politecnico di Milano, Department of Architecture, Built Environment and Construction Engineering, Via G. Ponzio 31, 20133 Milano, Italy, [email protected]

Roberto Bolici, Politecnico di Milano, Department of Architecture, Built Environment and Construction Engineering, Via G. Ponzio 31, 20133 Milano, Italy, [email protected]

Mark Deakin, Edinburgh Napier University, School of Engineering and Built Environment, 10 Colinton Road, EH10 5DT Edinburgh, United Kingdom, [email protected]

Notes

1. The keyword search was performed on April 2016 using the search query: “smart city” OR “smart cities” (Baseline 1992).

2. This growth is documented and discussed in other recent studies produced by Wolfram (2012) and D’Auria et al. (2014).

3. As suggested by De Bellis (2009) and Small and Griffith (1974), any field of research can be envisioned as a mosaic or puzzle of individual units (scientific documents) clustered together by way of subject-related repositories (journals) and produced through the research activities performed by a community of scholars (authors). These publications represent the output of research conducted into a specific field of study and raw data for performing bibliometric analyses. Therefore, they are defined as source documents: Small and Crane, 1979; Shiau and Dwivedi, 2013.

4. No searches have been done to retrieve all available literature on smart cities. Our keyword search was limited to English language documents.

5. “Many new categories of cities have entered the policy discourse: sustainable cities; green cities; digital cities; smart cities; intelligent cities; information cities; knowledge cities; resilient cities; eco cities; low carbon cities; liveable cities; and even combinations, such as low carbon eco cities and ubiquitous eco cities” (de Jong et al., 2015: 25). However, within the literature on urban development and innovation, these categories of cities are used interchangeably, even if they are characterized by conceptual and practical differences (de Jong et al., 2015). This generates the terminological confusion described by Hollands (2008) and Deakin and Al Wear (2011). Taking such differences into account and mindful of this study’s specific interest in smart cities, a decision was made to set the keyword search so that only documents containing the term “smart city” in singular or plural form were captured. These are considered to be the core documents for exploring what smart cities mean as knowledge objects. No varying or related terms are therefore considered in this search. This avoids the risk of adversely affecting the bibliometric study by including documents not directly connected to smart cities as a knowledge domain.

6. Considering the definition provided by Schopfel (2010), only conference papers included in repositories controlled by commercial publishers such as Springer, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), and Elsevier are not considered as gray literature.

7. Most of the gray literature is extracted form Google Scholar, which is a database particularly recommended for identifying this kind of publication (Hutton 2009).