Scientific Landscape of Smart and Sustainable Cities Literature: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

The smart sustainable city (SSC) is a concept created in response to problems and challenges arising from rapid urbanization. This is a relatively new term that is developing dynamically, which is confirmed by the growing number of publications over recent years. For this reason, this article presented an up-to-date comprehensive bibliometric analysis to describe and assess the scientific landscape of smart and sustainable cities literature. The analysis was based on two bibliographic sources—the Web of Science Core Collection and the Scopus database. It covers publications on the SSC, as well as documents describing the smart city (SC) and the sustainable city (SuC) concepts separately. VOSviewer and Biblioshiny were selected as software tools for the bibliometric analysis. Based on the descriptive bibliometric analysis, quantity and quality indicators were determined separately for the SC, SuC, and SSC concepts, while the network analysis mapped and covered the level of multi-faceted scientific cooperation in the field of the SSC research. The analysis results were intended to familiarize scholars and practitioners with the most prolific authors, sources, institutions, and countries in the analyzed scientific field, to identify the most influential research channels and impact from authors, sources, countries, and research topics, to determine major clusters of the SSC research and also to provide valuable information for further investigation.