Quantifying impact: Bibliometric examination of IoT's evolution in sustainable development

Abstract

The integration of Internet of Things (IoT) and sustainable development (SD) presents innovative solutions to global challenges, reflecting their pivotal roles in shaping future socio-economic and environmental landscapes. This bibliometric study explores the developing research domain of IoT and SD, focusing on their intersection. The extensive literature review section investigates and critically analyses most relevant papers from Web of Science (WoS) database that explore the IoT and SD domain, highlighting their main findings. Based on a WoS dataset of 908 articles from WoS, bibliometric techniques are applied to identify influential topics, scientific production evolution, key contributors, and thematic evolution. Authors like Singh, Gehlot, Akram, and Bibri have substantial publication records in IoT and SD. China leads in article contributions, followed by India, the USA, Spain, and the UK. The study maps the thematic evolution, and identifies emerging themes focusing on management, big data analytics, and environmental aspects like water and food sustainability. Future research directions should reside in interdisciplinary studies that integrate technology into sustainable practices and focus on energy consumption, safety or supply chain management with an emphasis on empirical assessments to understand their real-world impact.