Circular economy and internet of things: Mapping science of case studies in manufacturing industry

Abstract

This study investigates the “Internet of things” (IoT) and “Circular Economy” (CE) relationship in the current scientific literature focused on case studies or use cases on manufacturing context. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to map the science centered on “case studies” with respect to the “IoT” and “CE” connection, contributing to fill the gap of the subject that is already relevant to the scientific community and practitioners. The research methodology consists of developing a bibliometric study, employing PRISMA process, whose data is obtained from the Web of Science database. The VOSviewer was the computer program selected for the bibliometric analysis. The Web of Science (WoS) analysis tool supports VOSviewer. The papers were analyzed according to network analysis principles. The qualitative content analysis complements these results. The results show the high-frequency keywords and topics associated with the theme “IoT and CE”; the most cited papers; the intellectual structure of “IoT and CE”; the new emerging themes in scientific research; and social networks among the researchers. The paper’s contribution is the results of the bibliometric analysis and a better understanding of the relationship of “IoT” and “CE” by the “case studies” addressed in the empirical investigations.