Top

Information Systems and e-Business Management

Published in:

01-02-2020 | Original Article

A scientometric review of blockchain research

Authors: Liang Zhou, Lin Zhang, Ying Zhao, Ruoshu Zheng, Kaiwen Song

Published in: Information Systems and e-Business Management | Issue 3/2021

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config

AI-assisted search

Off

Abstract

As a new and rapidly developing distributed technology, blockchain has shown substantial impact on the fields of cryptocurrency and e-commerce and thus has attracted the interests of governments, enterprises, and research institutions. As such, it is important to understand the state of blockchain research in order for those institutions to plan their research effectively. Towards this goal, we first integrate two search strategies to construct a representative dataset. Then we analyze the blockchain literature between 2013 and 2018 in this dataset with a science mapping approach and Latent Dirichlet Allocation model. Based on the results of the analysis, we found the following insights: (1) the evolution of blockchain research involves many disciplines while two major disciplines—computer science and business—lead the way. (2) The current research can be divided into four research areas: underlying technology architecture, privacy and security, financial application, and smart scene applications. (3) The evolution of blockchain research has gone through three stages: basic blockchain technology, various business applications, and integration with advanced technologies such as fog computing, Internet of things, and artificial intelligence. (4) We also discovered a close coupling of two research issues that have transformative power, i.e., the potential by the application of cryptocurrency in the real world and the improvement of blockchain technology based on the application requirements. Overall, our study uses multiple complementary scientometric methods to generate a panoramic view of the recent developments in blockchain research. Future research directions and some limitations are discussed.

previous article The landscape of Blockchain research: impacts and opportunities

next article A survey of blockchain with applications in maritime and shipping industry

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 102.000 Bücher
über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 390 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Atzori L, Iera A, Morabito G (2010) The internet of things: a survey. Comput Netw 54:2787–2805. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2010.05.010CrossRef

Bashir M, Strickland B, Bohr J (2016) What motivates people to use bitcoin? Soc Inform Part II 10047:347–367. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47874-6_25CrossRef

Bentov I, Kumaresan R (2014) How to use bitcoin to design fair protocols advances in cryptology. Crypto Partt II 8617:421–439. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44381-1_24CrossRef

Blei DM, Ng AY, Jordan M (2003) Latent Dirichlet allocation. J Mach Learn Res 3:993–1022. https://doi.org/10.1162/jmlr.2003.3.4-5.993CrossRef

Bonneau J, Miller A, Clark J, Narayanan A, Kroll JA, Felten EW (2015) SoK: research perspectives and challenges for bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. IEEE Symp Secur Priv 2015:104–121. https://doi.org/10.1109/Sp.2015.14CrossRef

Chen CM (2006) CiteSpace II: detecting and visualizing emerging trends and transient patterns in scientific literature. J Am Soc Inf Sci Technol 57:359–377. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.20317CrossRef

Chen CM (2012) Predictive effects of structural variation on citation counts. J Am Soc Inf Sci Technol 63:431–449. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21694CrossRef

Chen CM (2013) Hindsight, insight, and foresight: a multi-level structural variation approach to the study of a scientific field. Technol Anal Strateg 25:619–640. https://doi.org/10.1080/09537325.2013.801949CrossRef

Chen CM (2017) Science mapping: a systematic review of the literature. J Data Inf Sci 2:1–40. https://doi.org/10.1515/jdis-2017-0006CrossRef

Chen CM, Leydesdorff L (2014) Patterns of connections and movements in dual-map overlays: a new method of publication portfolio analysis. J Assoc Inf Sci Technol 65:334–351. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.22968CrossRef

Chen CM, Ibekwe-SanJuan F, Hou JH (2010) The structure and dynamics of cocitation clusters: a multiple-perspective cocitation analysis. J Am Soc Inf Sci Technol 61:1386–1409. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21309CrossRef

Chen CM, Hu ZG, Liu SB, Tseng H (2012) Emerging trends in regenerative medicine: a scientometric analysis in CiteSpace. Expert Opin Biol Ther 12:593–608. https://doi.org/10.1517/14712598.2012.674507CrossRef

Chen Y, Chen CM, Hu ZG et al (2014) Principles and application of analyzing a citation space. Science Press, Beijing

Cheng C, Zhang Y, Ning X, Yang Y (2018) Overseas blockchain research topics and prospects. E-Government 186(60):20–30

Christidis K, Devetsikiotis M (2016) Blockchains and smart contracts for the internet of things. IEEE Access 4:2292–2303. https://doi.org/10.1109/Access.2016.2566339CrossRef

Ciaian P, Rajcaniova M, Kancs D (2016) The economics of BitCoin price formation. Appl Econ 48:1799–1815. https://doi.org/10.1080/00036846.2015.1109038CrossRef

Conoscenti M, Vetro A, De Martin JC (2016) Blockchain for the internet of things: a systematic literature review. In: International conference of computer systems and applications (AICCSA). https://doi.org/10.1109/AICCSA.2016.7945805

Du MX, Ma XF, Zhang Z, Wang XW, Chen QJ (2017) A review on consensus algorithm of blockchain. In: IEEE international conference on systems, man, and cybernetics (SMC), pp 2567–2572

Eyal I, Sirer EG (2014) Majority is not enough: Bitcoin mining is vulnerable. Commun Acm 61:95–102. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45472-5_28CrossRef

Eyal I, Gencer AE, Sirer EG, van Renesse R (2016) Bitcoin-NG: a scalable blockchain protocol. In: 13th Usenix symposium on networked systems design and implementation (Nsdi ‘16), pp 45–59

Fernandez-Carames TM, Fraga-Lamas P (2018) A review on the use of blockchain for the internet of things. IEEE Access 6:32979–33001. https://doi.org/10.1109/Access.2018.2842685CrossRef

Freeman L (1978) Centrality in social networks conceptual clarification. Soc Netw 1:281–310. https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-8733(78)90021-7CrossRef

Fu YP, Zhang ZJ (2018) Bibliometric analysis of mobile learning literature based on CiteSpace. J Hainan Trop Ocean Univ 25:125–133

Gao WC, Hatcher WG, Yu W (2018) A survey of blockchain: techniques, applications, and challenges. In: 2018 27th international conference on computer communication and networks (ICCCN)

Garay J, Kiayias A, Leonardos N (2015) The Bitcoin backbone protocol: analysis and applications advances in cryptology. Eurocrypt Partt II 9057:281–310. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46803-6_10CrossRef

Giechaskiel I, Cremers C, Rasmussen KB (2016) On bitcoin security in the presence of broken cryptographic primitives. Comput Secur Esorics Part II 9879:201–222. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45741-3_11CrossRef

Hawlitschek F, Notheisen B, Teubner T (2018) The limits of trust-free systems: a literature review on blockchain technology and trust in the sharing economy. Electron Commer Res Appl 29:50–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.elerap.2018.03.005CrossRef

Karame GO, Androulaki E, Roeschlin M, Gervais A, Capkun S (2015) Misbehavior in bitcoin: a study of double-spending and accountability. ACM Trans Inform Syst Secur 18:2. https://doi.org/10.1145/2732196CrossRef

Khalilov MCK, Levi A (2018) A survey on anonymity and privacy in bitcoin-like digital cash systems. IEEE Commun Surv Tutor 20:2543–2585. https://doi.org/10.1109/Comst.2018.2818623CrossRef

Kosba A, Miller A, Shi E, Wen Z, Papamanthou C (2016) Hawk: the blockchain model of cryptography and privacy-preserving smart contracts. In: 2016 IEEE symposium on security and privacy (Sp), pp 839–858. https://doi.org/10.1109/sp.2016.55

Kristoufek L (2013) BitCoin meets Google Trends and Wikipedia: quantifying the relationship between phenomena of the Internet era. Sci Rep 3:3415. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep03415CrossRef

Li J, Chen C (2016) Citespace: text mining and visualization in scientific literature. Capital University of Economics and Business Press, Beijing

Li X, Wang CA (2017) The technology and economic determinants of cryptocurrency exchange rates: the case of Bitcoin. Decis Support Syst 95:49–60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dss.2016.12.001CrossRef

Luxburg UV (2007) A tutorial on spectral clustering. Stat Comput 17(4):395–416. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11222-007-9033-zCrossRef

Matta M, Lunesu I, Marchesi M (2016) Is Bitcoin’s market predictable? Analysis of web search and social media. In: Fred A, Dietz J, Aveiro D, Liu K, Filipe J (eds) Knowledge discovery, knowledge engineering and knowledge management. IC3K 2015. Communications in computer and information science, vol 631. Springer, Cham, pp 155–172. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52758-1_10

Maurer B, Nelms TC, Swartz L (2013) “When perhaps the real problem is money itself!”: the practical materiality of Bitcoin. Soc Semiot 23:261–277. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2013.777594CrossRef

Meiklejohn S, Pomarole M, Jordan G, Levchenko K, Mccoy D, Voelker GM, Savage S (2013) A fistful of bitcoins: characterizing payments among men with no names. Commun ACM 59:86–93. https://doi.org/10.1145/2896384CrossRef

Miers I, Garman C, Green M, Rubin AD (2013) Zerocoin: anonymous distributed e-cash from bitcoin. In: IEEE symposium on security and privacy, pp 397–411 https://doi.org/10.1109/sp.2013.34

Nakamoto S (2008) Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. Accessed 24 Oct 2018

Parino F, Beiro MG, Gauvin L (2018) Analysis of the Bitcoin blockchain: socio-economic factors behind the adoption. EPJ Data Sci 7:38. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-018-0170-8CrossRef

Peters GW, Chapelle A, Panayi E (2016) Opening discussion on banking sector risk exposures and vulnerabilities from virtual currencies: an operational risk perspective. J Bank Regul 17:239–272. https://doi.org/10.1057/jbr.2015.10CrossRef

Polasik M, Piotrowska AI, Wisniewski TP, Kotkowski R, Lightfoot G (2016) Price fluctuations and the use of bitcoin: an empirical inquiry. Int J Electron Commer 20:9–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/10864415.2016.1061413CrossRef

Reid F, Harrigan M (2011) An analysis of anonymity in the bitcoin system. In: Security and privacy in social networks, pp 197–223. https://doi.org/10.1109/PASSAT/SocialCom.2011.7

Risius M, Spohrer K (2017) A blockchain research framework what we (don’t) know, where we go from here, and how we will get there. Bus Inform Syst Eng 59:385–409. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-017-0506-0CrossRef

Seebacher S, Schuritz R (2017) Blockchain technology as an enabler of service systems: a structured literature review. Lect Notes Bus Inf Process 279:12–23. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56925-3_2CrossRef

Vasek M, Thornton M, Moore T (2014) Empirical analysis of denial-of-service attacks in the bitcoin ecosystem. Lect Notes Comput Sci 8438:57–71. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44774-1_5CrossRef

Wood G (2014) Ethereum: a secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger. Ethereum Proj Yellow Pap 151:1–32

Xu M, Chen X, Kou G (2019) A systematic review of blockchain. Financ Innov 5:27. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40854-019-0147-zCrossRef

Yang Y (2009) Knowledge measurement in domestic and foreign robotics. Dalian University of Technology

Zhao JL, Fan SK, Yan JQ (2016) Overview of business innovations and research opportunities in blockchain and introduction to the special issue. Financ Innov 2:28. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40854-017-0059-8CrossRef

Zyskind G, Nathan O, Pentland A (2015) Decentralizing privacy: using blockchain to protect personal data. In: 2015 IEEE security and privacy workshops (Spw), pp 180–184. https://doi.org/10.1109/spw.2015.27

Title: A scientometric review of blockchain research
Authors: Liang Zhou
Lin Zhang
Ying Zhao
Ruoshu Zheng
Kaiwen Song
Publication date: 01-02-2020
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Published in: Information Systems and e-Business Management / Issue 3/2021
Print ISSN: 1617-9846
Electronic ISSN: 1617-9854
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10257-020-00461-9

Springer Professional

Abstract

Please log in to get access to your license.

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Springer Professional "Technik"

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Other articles of this Issue 3/2021

Creating shared value to redesigning IT-service products using SYRCS; Diagnosing and tackling complex problems

A survey of blockchain with applications in maritime and shipping industry

The landscape of Blockchain research: impacts and opportunities

How can we reduce information asymmetries and enhance trust in ‘The Market for Lemons’?

Understanding augmented reality adoption trade-offs in production environments from the perspective of future employees: A choice-based conjoint study

Processes, benefits, and challenges for adoption of blockchain technologies in food supply chains: a thematic analysis