Comprehensive Bibliometric Analysis on Smart Grids: Key Concepts and Research Trends

Abstract

Over the years, a rapid evolution of smart grids has been witnessed across the world due to their intelligent operations and control, smart characteristics, and benefits, which can overcome several difficulties of traditional electric grids. However, due to multifaceted technological advancements, the development of smart grids is evolving day by day. Thus, smart grid researchers need to understand and adapt to new concepts and research trends. Understanding these new trends in smart grids is essential for several reasons, as the energy sector undergoes a major transformation towards becoming energy efficient and resilient. Moreover, it is imperative to realize the complete potential of modernizing the energy infrastructure. In this regard, this paper presents a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of smart grid concepts and research trends. In the initial search, the bibliometric data extracted from the Scopus and Web of Science databases totaled 11,600 and 2846 records, respectively. After thorough scrutiny, 2529 unique records were considered for the bibliometric analysis. Bibliometric analysis is a systematic method used to analyze and evaluate the scholarly literature on a particular topic and provides valuable insights to researchers. The proposed analysis provides key information on emerging research areas, high-impact sources, authors and their collaboration, affiliations, annual production of various countries and their collaboration in smart grids, and topic-wise title count. The information extracted from this bibliometric analysis will help researchers and other stakeholders to thoroughly understand the above-mentioned aspects related to smart grids. This analysis was carried out on smart grid literature by using the bibliometric package in R.