The Evolution of the Industry 4.0: A Retrospective Analysis Using Text Mining

Abstract

Industry 4.0 and its applications have attracted the interest of both experts of industry and researchers of academy. This interest started to build a vast body of literature on the related topics and caused to raise a new question about how the related literature has changed over time. In this context, the major objective of the presented study is to provide insight about the scientific researches on industry 4.0 using the publications from the Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge database during the period of 2007-2017. For this aim, the retrieved academic studies were analyzed using quantitative and text mining analyses to observe the change in number of publications over years and to gain insight about the textual structure. The results of the quantitative analysis showed that the popularity of industry 4.0 in the academy has risen significantly and reached the peak point in 2017 with 2658 articles. According to the text mining study, the most important research topics related to the industry 4.0 field are "mobile", "internet of things" and "cloud computing".