Analysing the state of the art of Blockchain application in Smart Cities: A bibliometric study

Due to social, economic, and environmental problems, the need arises to develop what is known as a Smart City allowing to improve the quality of people’s lives together with the application of emerging technologies such as Blockchain and providing improvements in different areas such as medical care, intelligent transport, or the supply chain management. The investigation analyses the association between Blockchain and Smart Cities using a Bibliometric Analysis, collected data from 384 articles published between 2018 and October 2022 with the topics ‘Blockchain’ and ‘Smart Cities’ from the Web of Science database. It has executed the VOSviewer program to appreciate the Bibliometric Analysis. The work has identified six research trends related with these fields.

I. Introduction

With the growing industrialisation of IoT, a large amount of data is produced in Smart Cities, the development of a useful Big Data analysis tool that uses AI has some challenges such as centralisation, security and privacy that can be solved with the use of Blockchain that, being a decentralised architecture, allows a secure exchange of data in IoT devices, in this way it is possible to converge Blockchain and AI for IoT [1].