Exploring trends in blockchain publications with topic modeling: Implications for forecasting the emergence of industry applications

Abstract

Technological innovation generates products, services, and processes that can disrupt existing industries and lead to the emergence of new fields. Distributed ledger technology, or blockchain, offers novel transparency, security, and anonymity characteristics in transaction data that may disrupt existing industries. However, research attention has largely examined its application to finance. Less is known of any broader applications, particularly in Industry 4.0. This study investigates academic research publications on blockchain and predicts emerging industries using academia-industry dynamics. This study adopts latent Dirichlet allocation and dynamic topic models to analyze large text data with a high capacity for dimensionality reduction. Prior studies confirm that research contributes to technological innovation through spillover, including products, processes, and services. This study predicts emerging industries that will likely incorporate blockchain technology using insights from the knowledge structure of publications.