Cited by 118Smart Cities and Technologiesscientometrics and bibliometrics researchSustainable Urban and Rural Development

Understanding Smart City—A Data-Driven Literature Review

Open access
Stübinger, Johannes, Schneider, Lucas·2020·Sustainability

Abstract

This paper systematically reviews the top 200 Google Scholar publications in the area of smart city with the aid of data-driven methods from the fields natural language processing and time series forecasting. Specifically, our algorithm crawls the textual information of the considered articles and uses the created ad-hoc database to identify the most relevant streams “smart infrastructure”, “smart economy & policy”, “smart technology”, “smart sustainability”, and “smart health”. Next, we automatically assign each manuscript into these subject areas by dint of several interdisciplinary scientific methods. Each stream is evaluated in a deep-dive analysis by (i) creating a word cloud to find the most important keywords, (ii) examining the main contributions, and (iii) applying time series methodologies to determine the past and future relevance. Due to our large-scaled literature, an in-depth evaluation of each stream is possible, which ultimately reveals strengths and weaknesses. We hereby acknowledge that smart sustainability will come to the fore in the next years—this fact confirms the current trend, as minimizing the required input of energy, water, food, waste, heat output and air pollution is becoming increasingly important.

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Research works printed but not linked: 4

  1. Nowicka, K. Smart city logistics on cloud computing model. Procedia-Soc. Behav. Sci. 2014, 151, 266-281.
  2. Papa, R. Smart cities: Researches, projects and good practices for the city. TeMA J. Land Use Mobil. Environ. 2013, 1, 3-4.
  3. Al-Hader, M.; Rodzi, A. The smart city infrastructure development & monitoring. Theor. Empir. Res. Urban Manag. 2009, 4, 87-94.
  4. Papa, R. Planning for energy, transportation and sustainability of the urban system. TeMA J. Land Use Mob. Environ. 2014, 1, 1-998.

Authors
Stübinger, J., & Schneider, L.
Affiliations
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (DE)
Corresponding author
Stübinger, Johannes
Venue
Sustainability
Publisher
MDPI AG
Published
2020-10-14
Volume
12
Issue
20
Pages
8460
ISSN
2071-1050 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3092962164
Cited by
118
References
210
Citations by year
2026: 10 · 2025: 15 · 2024: 27 · 2023: 33 · 2022: 14 · 2021: 19
FWCI
8.49
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Sustainability (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • OPUS FAU (Kooperativer Bibliotheksverbund Berlin-Brandenburg (KOBV), on behalf of the Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen-Nürnberg) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
Funders
FAU Open Access Publikationsfonds (20200830)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Media Technology › Smart Cities and Technologies
  • Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
  • Social Sciences › Urban Studies › Sustainable Urban and Rural Development
Keywords
smart cities, research trends, smart infrastructure, smart technologies, smart healthcare, keyword analysis

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