Industry 5.0: Tracking Scientific Activity on the Most Influential Industries, Associated Topics, and Future Research Agenda

Abstract

Industry 5.0 arrived and sounded the alarms, warning entrepreneurs to adopt it as quickly as possible; the advantage is that this industry is still in its preliminary stages. However, there is little research on this model in the literature. In this context, the objective of this study was to analyze the current state of industry 5.0 in 215 publications from the Scopus database during the period 2019–2022. The applied methodology was quantitative analysis, with a bibliometric approach supported by the VOSviewer and RStudio software, in addition to the Microsoft Excel application. The results showed: (1) an exponential growth of article and conference paper publications in 2022, all indexed in journals of subject areas such as engineering and computer science; (2) four more industries influenced by i5.0, where the electronics sector leads well above manufacturing, energy and public service; (3) seven research topics associated with i5.0 that deal with the transition from industry 4.0 to 5.0; and (4) six little-explored research topics that would help i5.0 move to a new stage and which are related to environmental sustainability, social sustainability, cobots, bioeconomy, smart cities, and sentiment analysis. This study found a gap in the industry 5.0 literature; therefore, this document serves as a guide for future research.