Mapping Smart Materials’ Literature: An Insight between 1990 and 2022

Abstract

The field of smart materials (SMs) is an area of great interest in the scientific community and one that is growing considerably from year to year due to the features this field brings to the development of high-performance products and applications. Considering these aspects, researchers choose to contribute to this field, and every year, an increasing number of scientific publications appear in the databases. Based on this consideration, the present paper approaches the domain of SMs from a quantitative perspective by carrying out a bibliometric analysis to provide young researchers with a mapping of the most important aspects, as well as the evolution of the field. The bibliometric analysis was carried out in the time frame 1990–2022 in the Web of Science (WoS) database, finding only selected research and review articles based on the most relevant keywords used in the domain. Based on the large number of results identified (8998 publications), the authors designed a classification of the most important aspects of bibliometric analysis.