A Bibliometric Analysis of Blockchain Research

Abstract

Taking Ei Compendex (EI) and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) databases as the literature sources, this paper presented a bibliographic analysis of the blockchain-related literature between January 2011 and September 2017. For each literature source, we built a separate dataset. Authors' productivity and collaboration, affiliation of authors and collaboration amongst institutions were analyzed using techniques of social networks analysis on both datasets. According to the results, the CNKI authors/institutes raised their productivity and outperformed the EI authors/institutes since 2016. However, the EI authors/institutes show a higher level than the CNKI authors/institutes in collaboration. We also summarized the hot topics on the EI dataset using textual analysis and discovered researchers have shifted their attention from Bitcoin itself to the blockchain technology underlying it.