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Visualizing the studies on smart cities in the past two decades: a two-dimensional perspective

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Abstract

Smart cities have become a very popular topic in transdisciplinary discourses and in academic research during the past decades, especially since 2013, and there has been rapid growth in the number of publications highly related to smart cities in Web of Science. To further visualize the relevant studies on smart cities in past decades, in particular the past 5 years, a two-dimensional perspective is proposed, and several bibliometric techniques are conducted. Through a co-word and bibliographic coupling analyses based on the proposed two-dimensional perspective, the research frontiers, hot issues and implications of smart cities are partly revealed and discussed. Actually, smart city is a typical interdisciplinary/trans-disciplinary topic; therefore, as a case study, the work presented by this paper could be helpful and valuable to facilitate the understanding on smart cities, and the knowledge exchange between the relevant academic areas on smart cities.

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Notes

  1. https://www.un.org/development/desa/publications/2018-revision-of-world-urbanization-prospects.html.

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Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71673088), the Major projects of the National Social Science Fund (No. 18ZDA062), the Foundation of Guangdong Soft Science (No. 2018A070712003).

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  1. School of Business Administration, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China

    Munan Li

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  1. Munan Li
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Correspondence to Munan Li.

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Li, M. Visualizing the studies on smart cities in the past two decades: a two-dimensional perspective. Scientometrics 120, 683–705 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03134-8

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