The Thematic study of Research in the Smart City Scope

This paper aims to analyze the research trends in smart cities all around the world, in order to demonstrate the most and the least active fields as well as drawing the map of the most active countries in this scope.

The bibliometric data of 4696 indexed scientific work were collected from Web of Science, within 1970 – January 2018. The data were analyzed using content analysis and visualized by tables, charts and atlases from geographical and thematic aspects.

The results showed some countries had focused on a special aspect of smart cities and more than half of the studies were in smart IT infrastructure.

Highly cited fields in the area of smart cities in order were: smart information technology infrastructure, smart government, smart environment, smart mobility, smart energy, smart economy and smart citizen. Conducting 0.4% of the whole rstudies, Antonio J Jara was found to be the most active author, and “natural science foundation of china” was the most active funding institution. The Atlas showed that the frontier countries in research on smart cities were China, Spain and Italy. China`s main focus was on smart infrastructure while Spain’s was smart citizens and smart energy. Italy`s research were mostly concentrated on smart government, smart mobility, and smart environment. In general, it can be concluded that "smart IT infrastructure” was the most noted among components of smart cities.