Research Fronts and New Applications of RFID Technology - A Bibliometric Analysis of the Research Literature

The master thesis presents an analysis of the research literature about radiofrequency identification (RFID). It consists of a theoretical part and a practical part. The theoretical part explains the technology behind RFID and shows the existing application spectrum of this diverse and prominent technology. It also discusses the norms and standards in this area. Furthermore the theoretical part contains a short introduction into scientometrics which is the basis for the following analysis. The practical part represents the analysis, which was conducted with the bibliometric visualisation software Bibliometric Technology Monitoring (BibTechMon). With this software knowledge inherent in the analysed data can be discovered. BibTechMon was developed at the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) which was also a cooperation partner of this master thesis. For this analysis 8,994 bibliographic records have been analysed. The data was retrieved from “Web of Science”. In the main part of the thesis the research fronts of RFID technology are identified and on this basis future application domains are derived.