Bibliometric Analysis of Fourth Industrial Revolution Applied to Material Sciences Based on Web of Science and Scopus Databases from 2017 to 2021

Abstract

Material science is a broad discipline focused on subjects such as metals, ceramics, polymers, electronics, and composite materials. Each of these fields covers areas associated with designing, synthesizing, and manufacturing, materials. These are tasks in which the use of technology may constitute paramount importance, reducing cost and time to develop new materials and substituting try-and-error standard procedures. This study aimed to analyze, quantify and map the scientific production of research on the fourth industrial revolution linked to material science studies in Scopus and Web of Science databases from 2017 to 2021. For this bibliometric analysis, the Biblioshiny software from RStudio was employed to categorize and evaluate the contribution of authors, countries, institutions, and journals. VOSviewer was used to visualize their collaboration networks. As a result, we found that artificial intelligence represents a hotspot technology used in material science, which has become usual in molecular simulations and manufacturing industries. Recent studies aim to provide possible avenues in the discovery and design of new high-entropy alloys as well as to detect and classify corrosion in the industrial sector. This bibliometric analysis releases an updated perspective on the implementations of technologies in material science as a possible guideline for future worldwide research.