Internet of things: A scientometric assessment of global output, 2005–2014

The publication examines 6800 global publications on “Internet of Things” (IoT), as covered in Scopus database during 2005–2014, experiencing an annual average growth rate of 98.63% and citation impact of 1.97. The global publications on IoT came from several countries, of which the top 12 (China – 44.87%, USA – 8.04%, Germany – 6.06%, Italy – 5.19%, UK – 4.84%, Spain – 4.19%, France – 3.46%, Taiwan – 2.53%, South Korea – 2.34%, Switzerland – 2.16%, Finland – 2.03%, and India – 1.87%) together accounts for 87.57% and 89.56% share of the global publication and citations output during 2005–2014. Only 27.96% of the total global publications were cited one or more times during 2005–2014. Among subjects contributing to IoT, computer science contributed the highest publication share (64.93%), followed by engineering (43.01%), social sciences (4.65%), business, management and accounting (3.73%), physics (2.94%), and decision science (2.72%) during 2005–2014. Under broad subjects, the major priorities have been assigned to hardware (technology) with 43.87% share, followed by applications (42.93% share), architectural aspects of technology (22.69% share), security aspects (17.43% share), software (technology) (7.10% share), privacy (6.13% share), business models (0.85% share), governance (0.62% share), legal aspects and accountability (0.5% share), etc. Among the various organizations and authors contributing to IoT, the 20 most productive organizations and authors together contributed 16.78% and 6.13% publications share and 25.63% and 23.16% citation share to the cumulative global publications and citations output during 2005–2014. The top 15 most productive journals contributed 24.54% share to the total journal global publication output during 2005–2014, with largest number of papers (55) is published in Jisuanji Xuebao Chinese Journal of Computers, followed by International Journal of Distributed Sensor Network (50), Sensors Switzerland (46), China Communication (34), Wireless Personnel Communication (33), IEEE Sensors Journal (28), etc. There were only 10 highly cited papers (which came from 8 countries and involved 24 institutions and 41 authors), which had received 100 or more citations, and together got 2951 citations during 2005–2014.