Industry 4.0 whithin Innovation: Bibliometric Analysis

  Introduction: the purpose of this research is to analyze the relationships and growth trends of Industry 4.0 within the global universe of current literature on innovation, limited to the subject area of business, administration, and accounting by means of a bibliometric analysis. Method: Scopus is used as a database for the analysis of 513 documents for the period from 1998 to 2021. VOS viewer was used for processing Scopus database and elaboration of figures representing the relationships between samples.                Results: the number of documents is exponentially growing, starting with a trend in 2017 and increasing ever since. The most dynamic source is Technological Forecasting And Social Change. The author with most documents is Voight, K. L. with 10, and the most distinguished institution is the University of Johannesburg with 14 documents. The country with more documents is Italy, with 69. According to the database 69 % of the total documents are articles and 23,4 % are conference papers. The number of documents in the area of Business, Management and Accounting, with 513 documents, exceeds by far any other area, representing 42 % of all documents. The funding sponsor with more documents is the National Natural Science Foundations of China with 13 documents. Some of the most updated organizations are Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, The center for digital labor markets. The country with more documents is United Kingdom with 50 documents and 584 citations, followed by United States with 1110 citations. United States has mainly bonds with China, Australia, United Kingdom, Germany and Italy. United Kingdom has mainly bonds with France, Italy, Germany and United States. China’s main relations are Australia, United States, Pakistan, Taiwan, Turkey, Brazil and South Korea. Italy’s main bonds are France, Spain, Brazil, Russian Federation, United Kingdom, Austria and Portugal. It could be determined that countries are mostly grouped in 6 clusters. Conclusion: Although there are not many publications yet, it can be inferred that the term industry 4.0 within the available literature of innovation will keep increasing exponentially over time reinforcing relations between authors, institutions and countries. Based on the current state of literature, the subject area of business, management, and accounting will keep on being the one that encompasses most of the available documents.