Exploring the dynamic knowledge structure of studies on the Internet of things: Keyword analysis

Abstract

A wide range of studies in various disciplines has focused on the Internet of Things (IoT) and cyber-physical systems (CPS). However, it is necessary to summarize the current status and to establish future directions because each study has its own individual goals independent of the completion of all IoT applications. The absence of a comprehensive understanding of IoT and CPS has disrupted an efficient resource allocation. To assess changes in the knowledge structure and emerging technologies, this study explores the dynamic research trends in IoT by analyzing bibliographic data. We retrieved 54,237 keywords in 12,600 IoT studies from the Scopus database, and conducted keyword frequency, co-occurrence, and growth-rate analyses. The analysis results reveal how IoT technologies have been developed and how they are connected to each other. We also show that such technologies have diverged and converged simultaneously, and that the emerging keywords of trust, smart home, cloud, authentication, context-aware, and big data have been extracted. We also unveil that the CPS is directly involved in network, security, management, cloud, big data, system, industry, architecture, and the Internet.