Is the Concept of Industry 4.0 Still Interesting for Scientists due to the Emergence of Industry 5.0? Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Abstract Research purpose. Through Industry 4.0, also referred to as the fourth industrial revolution, new technologies or traditional production resources have been transformed into intelligent objects enhanced by the possibility of identification, scanning, and networking. In recent years, the concept of Industry 5.0 has already started to be discussed. However, is Industry 4.0 an uninteresting or sufficiently researched topic for scientists? The main aim of the scientific article is to perform a bibliometric analysis of the Industry 4.0 issue. The aim was supported by six research questions that reflect the publication trend in the years 2012–2022, the most publishing countries, the most used keywords, the Web of Science category, and authors and publishers. Design / Methodology / Approach. The data was obtained from the renowned Web of Science database. The monitored period was 2012–2022 for Industry 4.0 and 2016-2022 for Industry 5.0. The year 2023 was excluded from the analysis, as the year 2023 is not finished. The total number of publications that were used in the bibliometric analysis was 20,151 (I4.0) and 293 (I5.0). VOSviewer and MS Excel were used for graphical data processing. Findings. The oldest publication dedicated to Industry 4.0 in the Web of Science database dates back to 2012. The most scientific articles were seen in 2021, namely 4,326 (I4.0) and 201 in 2022 about I5.0. In 2022, 3848 publications were published. In addition, authors from Germany (2,450), Italy (2,318), China (1,515), and the USA (1,220) address the issue of Industry 4.0. All the countries of the Visegrad Group, Poland (859), the Czech Republic (859), Slovakia (539), and Hungary (282) are most concerned with this problem. If the publications are divided into categories according to the Web of Science database, most of them are included in the categories Engineering Industrial, Engineering Manufacturing, Engineering Electrical Electronic, Computer Science Theory Methods, or Computer Science Information Systems. Publications on Industry 4.0 are published mainly by publishers such as IEEE, Elsevier, Springer, and MDPI. The authors who are most devoted to the mentioned issue are Popkova, Martinek, Rauch, Bogoviz, Silva, and Xu. Originality / Value / Practical implications. The added value of the scientific article is the summarisation of theoretical starting points from the field of Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0. Likewise, the article is original from the point of view of conducting a bibliometric analysis, focused on the development of the number of publications, the authors who are most devoted to the given topic, the most commonly used keywords, or countries that focus on Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0 issues the most. The originality of the article also lies in the mapping of the publications of the monitored issue for the entire previous year, 2022.