Sustainability and Quality of Life in Smart Cities: Analysis of Scientific Production

Abstract

Economic, social, and environmental sustainability of cities stands out from other important challenges that come from constant urban development at the global level. This fact attracts many researchers from different areas of knowledge that pretend to carry out the way cities will be managed in future. A study on the smart cities analyzes a tendency to settle urban centers and their adaptation for increasing the population growth following six central concepts that influence on a city’s behavior: Economy, mobility, governance, people, living, and environment. This way, the aim of the authors is to describe an actual stage of scientific researches on the smart cities focused on sustainability and life quality. Following this purpose, a comparative bibliometric study on publications indexed in WoS and Scopus databases has been done, analyzing correlations between growths, coverage, overlapping, dispersion, and concentration of articles. This way, a search strategy has been established with the aim to get a representative subset of documents to gather them in an ad doc database used afterwards to extract the results. Taking into account these final results, we can conclude that although WoS and Scopus databases differ in terms of range, data volume, and coverage policies, the documents and their analysis are similar in several aspects, Scopus database being the one that covers better our area of study, having a higher number of journals, articles, and authors.