Insights into research on blockchain for smart contracts: a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Over the past few years, blockchain technology has gained significant attention. This surge in popularity can be attributed to the emergence of cryptocurrencies and the development of smart contracts. Cryptocurrency is a digital currency that eliminates the problem of double spending. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Stellar, Zcash, Maker, Aave, etc. become popular and are preferred for money transfers. Smart contracts are the next popular technology on the blockchain after cryptocurrency. It can be considered a piece of code that can execute automatically when the predefined conditions are fulfilled. Researchers believe that the potential of blockchain with smart contracts is only in its initial stages and that its true potential has yet to be fully discovered. Hence, an extensive bibliometric analysis is conducted to understand blockchain trends for smart contracts and to give future directions in this field. For this analysis, various steps are followed, starting with formulating the research question, defining the scope of our research, extracting and analyzing data, answering the research question, and finally, drawing a conclusion. This research paper will be fruitful for scholars and researchers, providing an extensive statistical and network analysis of extracted smart contracts publications.