Highlights
Abstract
Keywords
1. Introduction
2. Methods and materials
3. Results and findings
4. Discussion
5. Conclusion
Author statement
Declarations of Competing Interest
Acknowledgements
Appendix. : Review of selected articles in each research topic
References
Vitae
Abstract
There have been many attempts to transform cities into smart cities worldwide. However, it is difficult to understand and describe smart cities from different perspectives, given the widespread application of the concept of smart city in diverse disciplines, such as urban planning, electronic engineering, and computer sciences. This work conducted a comprehensive smart city literature review based on text mining of 3,315 papers on smart cities published in journals indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index databases. These include “all papers” classified as research articles published from 1999 to April 2020. Our findings show the state of the art of research on smart cities, including (i) smart city literature statistics from 1999 to 2019, (ii) 23 research topics related to smart cities, and (iii) geographical variations in smart-city research. Based on these findings, we offer theoretical and practical implications of (1) missing fields of studies, (2) future research directions, and (3) the applicability of text-mining techniques to literature reviews. We believe that this work, which aims to establish a common ground for understanding smart cities from multiple disciplinary perspectives, will encourage further research and development regarding smart cities.
1. Introduction
With the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IOT) technology, the idea of smart cities is attracting attention as a new growth engine and development strategy in many global cities. Many cities are introducing new urban services, using information and communications technology (ICT) to build smart cities that improve the quality of life of citizens. However, despite its obvious importance and popularity, there is a lack of in-depth understanding of smart cities in the literature, and the concept of “smart city” remains unclear. What is a smart city? What are the major smart city research areas and how are they related? What are the key technological factors of smart cities? What are the main application areas and how do they vary in different countries? In short, how should we describe “smart cities”?
A comprehensive review of smart cities across different fields may facilitate smart city planning and development. However, such integrative work is not easy to achieve because of the variety and volume of studies and applications related to smart cities. One of the commonly applied methodologies for integrative work is the bibliometric approach, which allows to identify how a specific concept or research discipline is formulated and how it correlates with other concepts by clarifying the relationships between all the concepts (Kalmaski and Kirby, 2012).