IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CLOUD CLOMPUTING VOL:PP NO:99 YEAR 2014

A Scientometric Analysis of
Cloud Computing Literature
Leonard Heilig and Stefan Vo
AbstractThe popularity and rapid development of cloud computing in recent years has led to a huge amount of publications
containing the achieved knowledge of this area of research. Due to the interdisciplinary nature and high relevance of cloud
computing research, it becomes increasingly difficult or even impossible to understand the overall structure and development
of this field without analytical approaches. While evaluating science has a long tradition in many fields, we identify a lack of a
comprehensive scientometric study in the area of cloud computing. Based on a large bibliographic data base, this study applies
scientometric means to empirically study the evolution and state of cloud computing research with a view from above the clouds.
By this, we provide extensive insights into publication patterns, research impact and research productivity. Furthermore, we
explore the interplay of related subtopics by analyzing keyword clusters. The results of this study provide a better understanding
of patterns, trends and other important factors as a basis for directing research activities, sharing knowledge and collaborating
in the area of cloud computing research.
Index Termscloud computing, cloud computing research, scientometric analysis, scientometrics, keyword cluster analysis.

I NTRODUCTION

cloud computing is a relatively

young field of research, the great interest in
academia and practice has led to a considerable
amount of publications in recent years. The interdisciplinary nature as well as technical and nontechnical potentials and challenges of cloud computing (e.g., discussed in [1], [2], [3], [4]) are some of
the main reasons for the rapid development. Given
the significantly increasing number of publications,
it becomes more and more important to investigate
the current state and evolution of cloud computing
research. Quantitative studies measuring and analyzing science activities form a type of research commonly known as scientometrics [5]. By providing a
view on a research field from a meta-perspective [6],
[7], scientometric studies facilitate the development
and improvement of an academic discipline [5], [8]
serving as a vital basis for defining and debating
future research agendas [9]. Assuming that scientific
activities are reflected through scientific publications,
scientometric studies apply empirical measures to
analyze scientific output of a specific field in order
to better understand the dynamics and structure of
its development. Thereby, it is possible to explore
the body of publications extensively, for example,
to observe citation patterns, number and types of
citations, number and structure of authors and so
forth. Going further, a scientometric study gives
some indication of research activities in general, such
LTHOUGH

The authors are with the Institute of Information Systems, University

of Hamburg, Von-Melle-Park 5, 20146 Hamburg, Germany.
E-mail: {leonard.heilig, stefan.voss}@uni-hamburg.de.

as with respect to knowledge sharing, research quality, socio-organizational structures, influential countries/affiliations/authors, development of key topics,
structural change, and economic impact of research.
For further reading see, e.g., [6], [8], [10], [11], [12],
[13]. Moreover, scientometrics, as an evaluation tool
of science, increasingly impacts the resource distribution of research institutions [12].
Regarding these facts, it is surprising that not
much work has been devoted to scientometric analysis of cloud computing research and even more so
regarding a comprehensive scientometric study of
the field. At this point, we are aware of three scientometric studies in the context of cloud computing. The
authors of [14] investigate 510 publications related to
cloud computing that are obtained from the Web of
Science (WoS) database for the years 2001-2010. They
look at the productivity of authors and contributing
countries by analyzing the number of publications
which is aggregated by WoS. In [15], 89 journal
papers related to cloud computing research in China
are investigated for the time period between 1993
and 2010. Based on the data of the Chinese Journal
Full-text Database (CNKI), the authors examine the
distribution of the number of journal papers, authors,
subjects and funded papers. In [16], scientometric
methods are applied to analyze the research progress
of cloud security research from 2008 to 2011 in China.
The authors investigate 103 journal articles of 76
journals provided by CNKI. They analyze types of
contributing affiliations and identify the key topics
exclusively focussing on cloud security. In general,
these studies lack of important insights, such as given
by an overview of current research topics and trends,
citation patterns and top publications.

Due to the relatively small number of publications

being analyzed and the specific area under consideration, the implications of those studies are limited. The
existing studies especially apply straight count measures to analyze the respective literature. Without
using specific scientometric techniques, for instance
different methods to evaluate the productivity of
authors or algorithms for a keyword cluster analysis,
it is difficult to generate novel insights. Consequently,
the main objective of this study is to provide a more
comprehensive view on the overall cloud computing
research area within a relevant time frame in order
to present empirical and relevant findings. In this
paper, we extend the observation period and apply a
variety of methods including quantitative and computational algorithms to analyze key aspects of cloud
computing research.
By considering the number of publications in the
area of cloud computing, we observe a significant
interest especially from 2008 onwards. Since then, the
number of articles dramatically increased year after
year. In Google Scholar, for instance, the number of
search results nearly doubles each year since 2008.
The significant increase of scientific literature can
also be recognized in the Scopus and WoS database.
Prior to 2008, Scopus indexed only three publications related to cloud computing, WoS only one
publication. At the time of this study (as of January
12, 2014), Scopus covers 15,376 relevant publications
while WoS covers 8,262 publications. To the best of
our knowledge, published cloud computing articles
in the time period from 2011 to 2013 are completely
unexplored by means of scientometrics.
In this paper, we present a comprehensive scientometric study that empirically explores publications
related to cloud computing covered by Elseviers
Scopus database from 2008 to 2013. In total, we
investigate 15,376 publications. To the best of our
knowledge, this is the first scientometric study that
assesses such a large number of peer-reviewed publications. Thus, the results of this study stand on a
broad empirical basis and may encourage scholars to
conduct more comprehensive scientometric studies
in other academic disciplines. We provide extensive
insights into publishing patterns (e.g., contributing
countries, distribution of outlets), analyze frequent
keywords and keyword clusters to identify widely
discussed topics and their relationships, provide insights into citation patterns of outlets, publications,
affiliations and authors, and investigate the research
productivity of affiliations and scientists in the area
of cloud computing. Thereby, we present novel insights from a meta-perspective that may help to
better understand the evolution, state and trends
of cloud computing research. Due to limitations of
space, this study does not intend to give an overview
of cloud computing in general (for further comprehensive reading see, e.g., [17], [18], [19]).

TABLE 1
Number of publications per year
Database

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

Scopus
ISI WoS

74
5

641
441

1926
719

4038
1543

5146
3106

3551
2448

15376
8262

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 briefly describes the methodology
and methods being applied in this scientometric
study. In Section 3, publication patterns are investigated and further analyzed to understand the general
composition of the field from different perspectives.
The current focus of cloud computing research and
dependencies between topics are observed by analyzing top keywords and keyword clusters in Section 4.
Subsequently, the impact and productivity of cloud
computing research is examined in Sections 5 and 6.
Finally, a conclusion is presented in Section 7.

M ETHODOLOGY

The collection of relevant publications and citations

establishes the foundation for a scientometric analysis of a specific research area [7]. As indicated, this
study intends to cover a large part of peer-reviewed
cloud computing articles published in the last six
years. By this, we aim to obtain empirical evidence
for supporting the metascientific findings of this
scientometric study. In this section we describe our
proceeding regarding data collection, data processing
and proof-reading.
2.1

Data collection and cleansing

As manual processing of bibliographic data can be

extremely cost- and labor-intensive [9], we use Elseviers Scopus to collect and process structured
data of articles. The Scopus database has decisive
advantages over other bibliographic databases such
as Thomson Reuters WoS. First, the amount of cloud
computing articles being covered by Scopus is almost
twice as high as in WoS (see Table 1); this includes
article-in-press publications of a large number of
journals. Second, Scopus provides advanced functionality to export structured data including citation
and bibliographical information as well as abstracts,
keywords, and references. A general limitation of
using bibliographic databases is, however, that novel
articles are often not covered which explains the
decrease in the number of publications between the
years 2012 and 2013.
In order to cover a large part of publications in
cloud computing, a generic search query *cloud
computing* is used in the fields title, abstract, and
keywords. The asterisk acts as wildcard character.
The search query finds 16,042 articles for the observation period 2008-2013 (as of January 12, 2014).

Data cleansing actions are carried out to detect and

remove inaccurate data records (e.g., authors/title
not specified, double entries, etc.). Finally, we retain
15,376 publications containing 273,477 references and
32,620 unique keywords. Only 94.57 % of those publications have a non-empty bibliography resulting
in an average of 18.81 references per article. The
majority of publications, at an average 97.38 %, is
written in English.
2.2 Data processing
Based on an extensive bibliographic data basis, several meta-data attributes (e.g., authors, keywords,
document type, etc.) of the collected publications are
utilized to analyze certain aspects. In the following,
we briefly describe the methods being applied to
investigate research productivity, research impact,
and keyword clusters.
2.2.1 Research productivity
The review of literature reveals four basic approaches
to measure research productivity: straight count, author position, equal credit and normalized page size [9],
[20]. The straight count method assigns a score of one
to each of the co-authors of an article. This approach,
however, undervalues the productivity of singleauthor papers and favors individual co-authors of
multi-author papers. The author position approach,
in contrast, assigns a score based on the original
position of authorship and favors first authors. To
calculate the scores based on the position of authors,
the formula proposed by [21] is used [9]. Although
the method considers that the first author often is
the main contributor of an article, this approach is
error-prone to multi-author papers where the names
of co-authors are arranged in alphabetical order.
The equal credit method aims to compensate these
errors; it calculates a per-author score based on the
reciprocal of the number of authors so that the score
of each co-author is reduced by every additional
co-author. The last approach, normalized page size,
is not considered in this study for the following
two reasons. First, it assigns a score to each of the
authors based on the number of pages and authors
per publication and thus favors quantity rather than
quality. Second, outlets often limit the number of
pages per publication which would lead to an errorprone analysis of research productivity. In this study,
we primarily focus on the equal credit method.
2.2.2 Research impact
In order to measure the research impact, indices
based on individual citations are applied. This includes individual citations of journals, conferences,
and authors as well as the normalized citation impact
index (NCII) to consider the longevity of publications [9]. Regarding research productivity and research impact, we also discuss the Matthew effect

which describes the phenomenon that highly recognized scientists get most of the credit for contributions that are also presented by many other,
relatively unknown scientists [22]. As the credit given
by the scientists peers again influences recognition,
the effect leads to accumulated advantages for those
authors. Author and/or publication visibility is furthermore influenced by positive network membership effects, such as given by influential outlets,
research institutes or research collaborations [23].
2.2.3 Keyword analysis and other relevant aspects
To further explore key topics and aspects in
cloud computing from a meta-perspective, additional
methods are implemented based on the given data
basis. This includes algorithms for analyzing keyword clusters as well as for classifying and aggregating bibliographic data.
2.3

Proofreading

As indicated, one purpose of the scientometric analysis is to reduce the effort of analyzing a great amount
of peer-reviewed papers. Although the indexing of
scientific publications is highly standardized, some
inconsistencies can be detected, such as for the name
of research affiliations. To ensure the correctness of
results, generated outputs are validated by manual
proof-reading activities to identify inconsistencies.
The resulting semi-automatic process guarantees the
data quality and quality of results of this study.

A NALYSIS

OF PUBLISHING PATTERNS

We begin by analyzing the basic structure of cloud

computing research from different perspectives. First
of all, the distribution of involved research disciplines is investigated in order to evaluate major
disciplines involved in the development of the field.
Subsequently, the distribution of contributing countries is analyzed for all publications and for wellrecognized publications. On the level of publications, we further analyze the number of authors,
distribution of document types and the number of
publications per outlet.
3.1

Academic disciplines

To obtain an understanding of the general structure

and development of the cloud computing research
area, we start with a scientometric analysis of academic disciplines (see Table 2). Based on the chosen
publication outlet, which may be attributed to more
than one subject area, each publication is categorized
by Scopus [24].
The figures of the distribution of publications show
some interesting patterns. While the contribution in
the subject area Computer Science is nearly constant,
the number of contributions in other disciplines

TABLE 2
Subject areas (Avg. 1 %)
2008 (%)
54.55
20.66
4.13
2.48
7.44
1.65
4.13
0.83

2009 (%)
59.57
11.65
11.55
5.07
3.04
2.03
0.91

slightly indicates the effects of the hype surrounding

cloud computing in an early phase of development.
In particular for the business-related subject areas,
a peak of popularity and the subsequent effect of
disillusionment can be identified. According to Gartners Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies [25], cloud
computing reached the peak of inflated expectations
between 2008 and 2009 which is reflected by the
number of contributions in certain disciplines. This
implies that research activities in cloud computing
are partially affected by ongoing expectations.
The figures further indicate that the majority of
contributions in the area of cloud computing is related to Computer Science. This demonstrates that
a lot of research is primarily concerned with the
technology itself. This observation is also made in
other publications, such as in [4]. According to [4], it
is important to equally consider business-related issues associated with cloud computing. The numbers
further reveal a slight trend towards the application
of cloud technologies to support research and/or
business-related activities, such as in engineering and
mathematics, but also that general initial thoughts regarding potential applications are underpinned with
more theoretical considerations (e.g., regarding mathematical models in cloud pricing). We expect that
the trend towards a more productive use of cloud
computing in practice will continue in the future.
Social and business-related disciplines as well as the
interaction between them will become increasingly
important in order to understand the implications of
cloud computing from different perspectives.
3.2

Contributing countries and authorship

To obtain a deeper insight into contribution patterns,

we further investigate the distribution of publications
per country and authorship patterns. As shown in
Table 3 (R.: Rank), the majority of research on cloud
computing is carried out by researchers from China
(22.50 %) and the United States (19.16 %).
As these numbers alone do not provide enough
insight about the relevance of contributions per country, we also generate a ranking of contributing countries for publications that are cited by at least 50
other publications. The numbers in the right area of
Table 3 show that mostly authors from the United

2010 (%)
58.87
11.24
14.85
4.36
2.08
2.11
0.85
1.19

2011 (%)
60.74
13.82
13.82
3.35
2.52
1.33
0.89
1.14

2012 (%)
59.46
14.90
10.43
3.45
2.22
1.65
0.34
0.78

2013 (%)
49.29
23.48
11.03
4.02
1.61
1.33
0.22
1.11

Avg. (%)
57.1
16.0
11.0
3.8
3.2
1.7
1.1
1.0

TABLE 3
Contributing countries (left: all publications; right:
publications cited at least 50 times
R.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
Total

Country
China
USA
Germany
India
UK
Taiwan
South Korea
Australia
Japan
Italy
Canada
Spain
France
Austria
Brazil
Greece
Singapore

f (%)
22.50
19.16
5.07
4.86
4.47
3.60
3.29
3.17
3.15
2.85
2.63
2.51
2.39
1.24
1.20
1.14
1.01
84.24

R.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
7
7
7
7
12
12
12
12
16
16
Total

Country
USA
Australia
Germany
China
UK
Canada
Spain
India
New Zealand
South Korea
Austria
Greece
Israel
Switzerland
Singapore
Italy
Cyprus

f (%)
36.84
10.53
8.77
7.02
6.14
5.26
2.63
2.63
2.63
2.63
2.63
1.75
1.75
1.75
1.75
0.88
0.88
96.49

States (36.52 %) and Australia (10.43 %) have contributed widely recognized publications.
Regarding the authorship of publications the average number of authors per publication over the
last six years is depicted in Figure 1. The distribution
of authorship shows that for more than half of the
publications n the number of co-authors is between
two and four. In conjunction with the relatively high
percentage of publications with five or more authors,
the distribution demonstrates that collaboration may
have some advantages over research by individual
researchers. The interdisciplinary nature of cloud
computing research may be one of the main reasons
for the dominance of joint works.
publications (%)

Subject area
Computer Science
Engineering
Mathematics
Social Sciences
Business, Management and Accounting
Decision Sciences
Economics, Econometrics and Finance
Materials Science

30
23.67
20
10

10.61

26.38
20.19
10.44
4.57

3
5
6
4
number of authors

Fig. 1. Co-authorship distribution (n = 15376)

1.94
7

Min. citations
0
1
5
10
25
50
100
150
200
300
350

n
14541
5183
1415
661
213
86
31
17
9
4
3

f
18.81
22.00
24.44
24.93
28.06
31.10
30.68
31.86
29.44
36.00
37.33

3.3 Referencing
We next look at referencing patterns of publications
with a non-empty bibliography (n = 14541, see
Table 4). A table row describes the average number of
references f depending on the number of citations a
publication receives. The number of considered publications is expressed by n. For instance, a publication
which is cited by 100 or more publications contains
on average 30.68 references. By comparing those
numbers we find that frequently cited publications
(cited by at least 25 publications) contain on average
about ten references (f ) more than other publications.
The coverage of significant literature is recognized
as a main criterion for high quality research [26].
Although these findings stand on a broad empirical
basis, we have to consider that outlets often limit the
maximum number of pages per publication which
also affects the number of references.
3.4 Form of publication
The selection of an appropriate outlet often has an
influence on the visibility and impact of an article.
Consequently, it is interesting to analyze which type
of publication venue researchers prefer for conveying
their ideas and insights to the research community.
As the document type is specified for all observed
cloud computing articles, it is possible to analyze
the distribution of document types for a respective
research field. Table 5 indicates that most articles on
cloud computing, at an average 73.88 %, are preferably published through conference proceedings. This
can be explained by the fact that most of the research
activities are carried out by the computer science
research community, as shown in Table 2, where
conference publications have always had a dominant
presence and are legitimized as the primary means of
publication [27], [28]. One reason is that the review
and publishing of journal papers take a long time
whereas conference papers are usually published
much faster. In particular in a rapidly growing field
of research, as in the case with cloud computing, a
timely presentation is important; otherwise, it may
happen that an idea gets obsolete or is presented, in
a similar form, by other researchers.

To extend this analysis, we further investigate the

distribution of publications for conferences and journals. The number of publications per conference only
provides limited insights as it is usually dependent
on the size of a conference and is limited to a particular year. The number of publications per journal,
in contrast, reveals common journals for publishing
articles in the area of cloud computing. Table 6 shows
a list of journals and the related number of publications (f ). The numbers indicate that journal articles
are published by a wide variety of scientific journals
emphasizing the various theoretic roots, such as in
distributed computing [1]. Journals with a specific
focus on cloud computing, such as Journal of Cloud
Computing and IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing,
are not listed in the ranking mainly due to their
novelty.

F REQUENT

KEYWORDS AND KEYWORD

CLUSTERS

Keywords are an effective tool to abstractly represent

and classify the content of a scientific article. From a
meta-perspective, keywords provide the foundation
for analyzing the key topics and aspects representing
a respective research area. The emergence of new
popular topics can be quickly identified by looking
at the occurrence of keywords within a specific timeframe. By analyzing co-occurrences of keywords, it
is also possible to identify topics or aspects that are
strongly related to each other.
The scientometric study extracts 32,620 unique
keywords from the author keywords and index keywords field of the collected source articles. Note that
keywords are not always specified by the authors.
In case of missing keywords, index keywords are
manually assigned by professional indexers based
on several thesauri [24]. By this, we observe that
keywords are specified for 97.18 % of the analyzed
publications, while for 15.57 % of those publications,
index keywords have been assigned by Scopus. In
case that no author keywords are specified, we use,
if available, the indexed keywords of a publication
for the analysis of frequent keywords and keyword
clusters.
publications (%)

TABLE 4
Referencing patterns

30
23.67
20

26.38
20.19
10.44

10

4.57

2
2

2.43

5
6
7
4
number of keywords

Fig. 2. Number of keywords per pub. (n = 14942)

TABLE 5
Number of publications by document type
Outlet
Conference Paper
Journal Article
Journal Article in Press
Review
Other
n

2008 (%)
71.62
24.32
4.05
74

2009 (%)
75.04
21.06
0.16
0.47
3.28
641

2010 (%)
81.52
15.42
0.31
0.88
1.87
1926

2011 (%)
79.49
17.31
0.07
1.09
2.03
4038

2012 (%)
77.36
18.15
0.82
1.28
2.39
5146

2013 (%)
58.24
33.17
5.74
1.55
1.30
3551

Overall (%)
73.88
21.57
1.42
1.05
2.07
15376

TABLE 6
Number of publications per journal (f 30)
R.
1
2
3
4
5
5
7
7
9
10
11
11
13
14
15
16
17

Journal
Future Generation Computer Systems
Journal of Supercomputing
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
Fujitsu Scientific and Technical Journal
Concurrency Computation Practice and Experience
Computer
Journal of Huazhong University of Science and Technology
IEEE Internet Computing
Tongxin Xuebao/Journal on Communications
Journal of Grid Computing
Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology
IT Professional
Journal of Convergence Information Technology
Journal of Computational Information Systems
Cluster Computing
Jisuanji Xuebao/Chinese Journal of Computers
NEC Technical Journal

Regarding the average distribution of the number

of keywords per publication, we observe that commonly between three and six keywords are used to
capture the core topic of a publication (see Figure 2).
This observation is not specific for cloud computing;
publishers often specify the minimum and/or maximum number of keywords per publication. In order
to reduce the variability of keyword terms, publishers usually provide a predefined list of standardized
keywords being relevant for a specific journal or
conference.
The ranking of the top keywords with a high
frequency (f greater than or equal to 100) is provided
in Table 8. The results indicate that recent research
activities are mainly focussed on the technology itself
(e.g., virtualization, scheduling, energy efficiency, load
balancing), current challenges (e.g., security, privacy,
interoperability, quality of service, monitoring) and the
utilization of scalable cloud resources (e.g., scalability,
optimization, MapReduce). The literature reveals that
these topics are also discussed, e.g. with regard to
research challenges, in widely recognized publications, such as in [2], [3], [4], [17], [19]. This shows
that those publications have a huge impact on the
direction of cloud computing research. Popular links
to other fields of research are also revealed, for
instance with the keywords internet of things and grid
computing. Again, the dominance of computer science
related research in cloud computing is evident. By
analyzing frequent keywords per year, the emergence

f
100
56
50
49
47
47
44
44
43
40
35
35
34
33
33
31
30

and growing popularity of specific topics can be

documented. For example, the growing importance
of cloud computing to efficiently process large and
complex masses of structured and unstructured data
is depicted by keywords shown in Table 7. Based
on foundational research concerned with methods
(e.g., data mining techniques, MapReduce algorithm)
and technologies (e.g., Hadoop) we recognize the
emergence of new research topics in the field of
cloud computing, such as Big Data and the Internet
of Things. Consequently, the keyword analysis can be
used as a tool for identifying current research trends.
TABLE 7
Yearly occurrence of keywords
f
MapReduce
Hadoop
Data Mining
Big Data
Internet of Things

2008
2
1
1
0
0

2009
4
7
13
0
0

2010
45
29
14
0
0

2011
120
68
28
3
1

2012
133
98
52
27
9

As an area of interest is usually characterized by

more than one keyword, we further analyze the cooccurrences of keywords within the keyword list
of publications, also referred to as keyword cluster.
Frequent keyword clusters unveil interconnections
between different aspects and topics. While the analysis of top keywords is straight forward, the analysis
of keyword clusters is computationally complex since
every possible combination of relevant keywords

TABLE 8
Top keywords (f 100)
R.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
10
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
18
20
21
22
23
24
24
26
27
28

Keyword
cloud computing
virtualization
security
cloud
MapReduce
grid computing
computer systems
web services
virtual machines
Hadoop
internet
cloud services
SaaS
information technology
resource allocation
privacy
scheduling
data centers
quality of service
IaaS
virtualizations
virtual machine
cloud storage
access control
optimization
distributed computing
software as a service
mobile cloud computing

f
9354
680
510
439
398
370
365
309
270
267
267
266
259
253
229
227
225
222
222
200
188
185
175
173
173
165
164
158

R.
28
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
36
38
39
40
41
41
43
43
45
46
46
48
49
49
51
52
53
54
55

Keyword
scalability
middleware
performance
energy efficiency
resource management
cloud security
PaaS
load balancing
distributed computer systems
data mining
computer simulation
SOA
algorithms
architecture
computing resource
interoperability
QoS
data center
distributed systems
computer science
fault tolerance
clouds
internet of things
information management
virtual reality
service provider
monitoring

f
158
156
153
152
150
144
140
138
138
133
132
131
130
130
126
126
120
119
119
115
110
110
109
108
107
102
101

TABLE 9
Top keyword clusters of length 2 (f 35)
R.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
12
14
15
16
16

Keyword cluster
Hadoop
MapReduce
privacy
security
SaaS
PaaS
PaaS
IaaS
SaaS
IaaS
virtual machines
computer simulation
computing environments
computer systems
virtual machines
virtualizations
cloud services
distributed database systems
virtualizations
virtual reality
cloud services
web services
virtualization
security
computing system
computer systems
virtualization
cloud
data centers
virtual machines
cloud computing environments
computer systems
service oriented architecture (soa)
information services

f
124
88
81
77
75
71
63
61
58
55
44
40
40
39
38
37
37

TABLE 10
Top keyword clusters of length 3 (f 15)
R.
1
2
3
4
5
5
7
8
8
10
10

PaaS
cloud services
computer program
virtualizations
computer simulation
information retrieval
methodology
computational biology
software as a service
PaaS
computer program

Keyword cluster
IaaS
distributed database systems
internet
virtual reality
virtualizations
internet
computer program
biology
platform as a service
IaaS
computational biology

SaaS
Web services
software
virtual machines
virtual machines
information storage and retrieval
software
methodology
infrastructure as a service
virtualization
software

f
70
30
22
20
18
18
17
16
16
15
15

TABLE 11
General citation patterns
Year
Number of publications
Number of citations
Longevity (in years)
Overall NCII score
Avg. NCII score / pub.

2008
74
1581
6
263.50
3.56

2009
641
8035
5
1607.00
2.51

2010
1926
11089
4
2772.25
1.44

2011
4038
8609
3
2869.67
0.71

2012
5146
3889
2
1944.50
0.38

2013
3551
585
1
585.00
0.16

TABLE 12
Number of citations per outlet (n = 15376)
Outlet
Conference Paper
Journal Paper
Review
Other
Number of citations

2008 (%)
84.19
15.81
1581

2009 (%)
47.69
46.45
2.14
3.72
8035

2010 (%)
52.60
31.12
13.45
2.82
11089

2011 (%)
50.32
40.66
7.13
1.89
8609

2012 (%)
48.65
45.18
3.81
2.37
3889

2013 (%)
15.04
70.94
11.45
2.56
585

Overall (%)
49.75
41.69
7.60
2.67
33788

needs to be compared. The implemented algorithm

incrementally increases the length of keyword clusters in order to identify all relevant co-occurrences. In
the following, we perform a keyword cluster analysis
for keyword clusters with two elements (Table 9)
and three elements (Table 10). To obtain meaningful
keyword clusters, we removed the keyword cloud
computing since it mainly demonstrates the relation
to cloud computing research (used in 60.84 % of
all observed publications). The findings reveal a
strong interrelation between certain keywords. For
the two element keyword clusters, for instance, we
see that the terms Hadoop and MapReduce as well as
privacy and security are often used together. For three
element keyword clusters we obtain, for instance,
that the combination of the terms IaaS, PaaS and
SaaS is common. By studying the generated keyword clusters, it is possible to identify dependencies
between certain keywords. For example, the term
cloud service is related to web services that rely on
distributed database systems or that virtualization has
an influence on the security of cloud computing.
Again, the technical focus of research is obvious.
Consequently, our findings help to better understand
the relevant topics in cloud computing research and
how they are related to each other. Furthermore,
the keyword cluster analysis provides the foundation
for generating a topic network consisting of nodes
(topics) and edges (relationship between topics).

number of publications we receive 33,788 citations.

The number of citations varies between 0 and 1,002
with an average of 2.197 references per article. In the
following, we evaluate the impact of contributions
from different perspectives.

5.2

C ITATION

PATTERNS

While the numbers given in the previous subsections

provide insights into publishing patterns and key
disciplines of cloud computing, a primary concern
of a scientometric study is to evaluate the impact of
contributions. A measure for analyzing the impact
of contributions is the aggregated number of citations a publication receives. The aggregated citations
of a publication express how often this publication
is referenced in other publications. For the overall

5.1

Overall citation patterns

First, we analyze the distribution and impact of citations in general. As time has a significant influence
on the number of citations a publication receives, we
use the NCII in order to make the citation numbers
of several years comparable. The NCII takes into
account the longevity of a publication which refers
to the number of years the publication has been in
print [9].
N CII =

number of citations per publication

publication longevity (in years)

(1)

The figures presented in Table 11 reveal some

interesting patterns. The most noticeable observation
is that the average NCII per publication is declining
which demonstrates the significant impact of early
and fundamental publications on other publications.
We also recognize a significant decline of citations
from 2011 to 2012. The main reason for this is that
many references used in publications of 2013 are still
not covered by Scopus (see Table 1).
Outlet citations

As a next step we analyze the distribution of citations

with respect to different publication outlets. The results shown in Table 12 outline that the main sources
of references are conference papers (49.75 %) and
journal papers (41.69 %). Regarding the number of
contributions per outlet, as analyzed in Section 3.4,
we observe that journal contributions are more efficient with respect to received citations. In addition,
the figures indicate that books and/or book chapters

TABLE 13
Conference citations (f 120)
R.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17

Conference
2nd IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science, CloudCom 2010
3rd IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing, CLOUD 2010
Grid Computing Environments Workshop, GCE 2008
9th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid, CCGRID 2009
4th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing, CLOUD 2011
1st ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, SoCC 2010
10th IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications, HPCC 2008
10th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Cluster, Cloud, and Grid Computing, CCGRID 2010
16th ACM Computer and Communications Security Conference, CCS 2009
3rd IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science, CloudCom 2011
2nd IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing, CLOUD 2009
19th ACM International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing, HPDC 2010
ICSE Workshop on Software Engineering Challenges of Cloud Computing, ICSE 2009
11th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing, CCGrid 2011
5th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing, CLOUD 2012
4th IEEE International Conference on eScience, eScience 2008
24th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications, AINA 2010

f
536
516
485
406
369
315
307
296
232
202
200
196
179
160
155
147
122

TABLE 14
Journal citations (f 100)
R.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26

Journal
Future Generation Computer Systems
IEEE Internet Computing
Computer
IEEE Security and Privacy
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
Jisuanji Jicheng Zhizao Xitong/Computer Integrated Manufacturing Systems
IT Professional
Communications of the ACM
Journal of Internet Services and Applications
IBM Journal of Research and Development
IEEE Pervasive Computing
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing
BMC Bioinformatics
Ruan Jian Xue Bao/Journal of Software
Computer Journal
Journal of Grid Computing
Decision Support Systems
Journal of Convergence Information Technology
Nature Photonics
IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems
International Journal of Information Management
Computing in Science and Engineering
Genome Biology
Advances in Information Sciences and Service Sciences
Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture

currently play a minor role in the area of cloud

computing. This is contradictory to other fields [12]
where books and book chapters are cited more frequently (see, e.g., scientometric studies in the journal
Scientometrics [6], [10]). Although scientific review
articles play a minor role, they receive a large part
of the remaining citations. This can be explained by
the simple fact that a review article can be seen as
a valuable measure to handle the rapidly growing
body of knowledge in cloud computing.
5.3

Conference and journal citation patterns

The figures of the previous section have shown that

most of the citations are received through conference and journal papers. To further investigate how

f
1569
755
703
415
374
352
340
338
276
231
206
202
198
193
178
161
160
158
136
130
123
118
115
106
102
101

n
100
44
47
23
50
23
35
11
11
8
2
12
26
10
14
11
40
4
34
2
2
11
10
1
29
3

f (rel)
15.69
17.16
14.96
18.04
7.48
15.30
9.71
30.73
25.09
28.88
103.00
16.83
7.62
19.30
12.71
14.64
4.00
39.50
4.00
65.00
61.50
10.73
11.50
106.00
3.52
33.67

IF
1.864
2.039
1.675
0.962
1.796
0.482
2.511
0.688
2.055
3.024
0.755
1.603
2.201
27.254
3.064
1.843
1.729
10.288
-

5-Year IF
2.033
2.498
2.403
1.019
2.031
2.564
1.684
2.566
3.510
0.954
3.037
31.567
3.263
1.898
1.676
8.959
-

the citations are distributed among different conferences and journals, we generate both a ranking
for conferences (see Table 13) and journals (see Table 14). Again, we apply a straight count method
to analyze the citation patterns in order to clearly
differentiate between research impact and productivity. By considering the conference citations, we
observe that widely cited publications are mainly
published by cloud computing-specific symposia. We
also see that influential publications are published by
three main conferences: IEEE International Conference
on Cloud Computing (Google Scholar h5-index: 30),
IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (Google Scholar h5-index: 29)
and IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster,

TABLE 15
Top cited publications (NCII score 30.0)
R.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
13
14
15
15

17

18
19
20
21

Authors
Armbrust M., Fox A., Griffith R., Joseph A.D., Katz R., Konwinski A., Lee G., Patterson D.,
Rabkin A., Stoica I., Zaharia M. (2010) A view of cloud computing. Communications of the
ACM 53(4):50-58.
Buyya R., Yeo C.S., Venugopal S., Broberg J., Brandic I. (2009) Cloud computing and emerging IT
platforms: Vision, hype, and reality for delivering computing as the 5th utility. Future Generation
Computer Systems 25(6):599-616.
Foster I., Zhao Y., Raicu I., Lu S. (2008) Cloud Computing and Grid Computing 360-degree
compared. In: Grid Computing Environments Workshop, pp. 1-10.
Nurmi D., Wolski R., Grzegorczyk C., Obertelli G., Soman S., Youseff L., Zagorodnov D.
(2009) The eucalyptus open-source cloud-computing system. In: 9th IEEE/ACM International
Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid, CCGRID 2009, pp. 124-131.
Zhang Q., Cheng L., Boutaba R. (2010) Cloud computing: State-of-the-art and research challenges.
Journal of Internet Services and Applications 1(1):7-18.
Subashini S., Kavitha V. (2011) A survey on security issues in service delivery models of cloud
computing. Journal of Network and Computer Applications 34(1):1-11.
Sotomayor B., Montero R.S., Llorente I.M., Foster I. (2009) Virtual infrastructure management in
private and hybrid clouds. IEEE Internet Computing 13(5):14-22.
Marston S., Li Z., Bandyopadhyay S., Zhang J., Ghalsasi A. (2011) Cloud computing - The
business perspective. Decision Support Systems 51(1):176-189.
Li H., Homer N. (2010) A survey of sequence alignment algorithms for next-generation
sequencing. Briefings in Bioinformatics 11 (5):473-483.
Wang H., Ma Y., Pratx G., Xing L. (2011) Toward real-time Monte Carlo simulation using a
commercial cloud computing infrastructure. Physics in Medicine and Biology 56(17):175-181.
Ristenpart T., Tromer E., Shacham H., Savage S. (2009) Hey, you, get off of my cloud: Exploring
information leakage in third-party compute clouds. In: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on
Computer and Communications Security, pp. 199-212.
Li B.-H., Zhang L., Wang S.-L., Tao F., Cao J.-W., Jiang X.-D., Song X., Chai X.-D. (2010) Cloud
manufacturing: A new service-oriented networked manufacturing model. Jisuanji Jicheng Zhizao
Xitong/Computer Integrated Manufacturing Systems 16(1):1-7.
Satyanarayanan M., Bahl P., Caceres R., Davies N. (2009) The case for VM-based cloudlets in
mobile computing. IEEE Pervasive Computing 8(4):14-23.
Hillerkuss et al. (2011) 26 Tbit s-1 line-rate super-channel transmission utilizing all-optical fast
Fourier transform processing. Nature Photonics 5(6):364-371.
Iosup A., Ostermann S., Yigitbasi N., Prodan R., Fahringer T., Epema D. (2011) Performance
analysis of cloud computing services for many-tasks scientific computing. IEEE Transactions on
Parallel and Distributed Systems 22(6):931-945.
Xu X. (2012) From cloud computing to cloud manufacturing. Robotics and Computer-Integrated
Manufacturing 28(1):75-86.
Buyya R., Yeo C.S., Venugopal S. (2008) Market-oriented cloud computing: Vision, hype, and
reality for delivering IT services as computing utilities. In: Proceedings of the 10th IEEE
International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications, HPCC 2008,
pp. 5-13.
Rochwerger B., Breitgand D., Levy E., Galis A., Nagin K., Llorente I.M., Montero R., Wolfsthal
Y., Elmroth E., Caceres J., Ben-Yehuda M., Emmerich W., Galan F. (2009) The Reservoir model
and architecture for open federated cloud computing. IBM Journal of Research and Development
53(4):1-11.
Zissis D., Lekkas D. (2012) Addressing cloud computing security issues. Future Generation
Computer Systems 28(3):583-596.
Chen K., Zheng W.-M. (2012) Cloud computing: System instances and current research. Ruan
Jian Xue Bao/Journal of Software 20(5):1337-1348.
Wang F.-Y. (2010) Parallel control and management for intelligent transportation systems: Concepts, architectures, and applications. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems
11(3):630-638.
Dikaiakos M.D., Katsaros D., Mehra P., Pallis G., Vakali A. (2009) Cloud computing: Distributed
internet computing for IT and scientific research. IEEE Internet Computing 13(5):10-13.

Cloud and Grid Computing. The reason is mainly

that these venues feature high quality and high impact research and serve a large academic audience.
Our results correspond to the Google Scholar h5metrics (http://scholar.google.de, date: 01/12/14).
By adding the journal impact factor (IF) from the 2012
Journal Citation Reports (JCR), which calculates the
average number of citations per publications based
on the two preceding years, we observe that the
average number of citations per journal article and
the IF are only slightly correlated (r = 0.47). An

NCII
250.50

f
1002

fG
5876

190.80

954

2018

63.00

378

1582

62.40

312

1300

60.75

243

631

52.00

156

502

49.60

248

554

47.33

142

477

45.50

182

284

44.67

134

142

42.80

214

720

42.25

169

198

41.00

205

422

41.00

123

149

40.67

122

261

36.50

73

36.50

219

1193

35.40

177

371

32.50

65

226

31.40

157

209

30.75

123

142

30.00

150

329

even smaller correlation is observed by using the

impact factor based on the last 5 years (r = 0.41). This
demonstrates that the impact of journal articles published within the emerging cloud computing research
area is not greatly influenced by the IF of journals.
It should be noted that the IF, aiming to reflect the
importance of journals, is not without any controversial discussion. A problem in the emerging area
of cloud computing research could be, for instance,
that relatively new, but influential journals are not
indexed in the JCRs.

TABLE 16
Top cited authors (NCII score 60.0)
R.
1
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
13
14
15
16
17
18
18
20
21
21
23
23
23
26
26
27
27
27
27
27
27
33
33
33

5.4

Name
Buyya, Rajkumar
Patterson, David
Griffith, Rean
Konwinski, Andy
Fox, Armando
Katz, Randy
Joseph, Anthony D.
Zaharia, Matei
Armbrust, Michael
Rabkin, Ariel
Lee, Gunho
Stoica, Ion
Yeo, Cheeshin
Venugopal, Srikumar
Brandic, Ivona
Broberg, James
Foster, Ian T.
Zhang, Lin
Tao, Fei
Youseff, Lamia
Li, Bohu
Beloglazov, Anton
Yong, Zhao
Lu, Shiyong
Raicu, Ioan
Montero, Ruben Santiago

Llorente,
Ignacio Martn
Wolski, Rich
Obertelli, Graziano
Nurmi, Daniel
Soman, Sunil
Grzegorczyk, Chris
Zagorodnov, Dmitrii
Cheng, Lu
Zhang, Qi
Boutaba, Raouf

Affiliation
U. of Melbourne
U. of California, Berkeley
U. of California, Berkeley
U. of California, Berkeley
U. of California, Berkeley
U. of California, Berkeley
U. of California, Berkeley
U. of California, Berkeley
U. of California, Berkeley
U. of California, Berkeley
U. of California, Berkeley
U. of California, Berkeley
U. of Melbourne
U. of Melbourne
Vienna U. of Technology
U. of Melbourne
U. of Chicago
Beihang U.
Beihang U.
U. of California, Santa Barbara
Beihang U.
U. of Melbourne
U. of Chicago
U. of Chicago
U. of Chicago
U. Complutense de Madrid
U. Complutense de Madrid
U. of California, Santa Barbara
U. of California, Santa Barbara
U. of California, Santa Barbara
U. of California, Santa Barbara
U. of California, Santa Barbara
U. of California, Santa Barbara
U. of Waterloo
U. of Waterloo
U. of Waterloo

Publication citation patterns

Next we focus on the top publications in cloud

computing. For this purpose, we calculated the total
count of citations as well as the NCII for each publication (note that not all articles in the ranking are referenced in the bibliography), as depicted in Table 15.
To compare the results with another citation measure,
a column f G is added containing the citation count
of Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.de, date:
01/12/14).
5.5

Author and affiliation citation patterns

In order to get an overview of the most influential

authors, we aggregate the NCII for each author.
Each co-author receives the full count of citations
of a corresponding article. A list of top authors is
given in Table 16. A column for the number of
publications being considered (n) and the frequency
of citations (f ) are added. We see that Rajkumar
Buyya of the University of Melbourne, a co-author of
two top publications (see Table 15), is currently the
most influential author in the area of cloud computing in terms of citations. This observation was
already made for the time period from 2001-2010
in [14]. Regarding the number of publications, we

Country
Australia
United States
United States
United States
United States
United States
United States
United States
United States
United States
United States
United States
Australia
Australia
Austria
Australia
United States
China
China
United States
China
Australia
United States
United States
United States
Spain
Spain
United States
United States
United States
United States
United States
United States
Canada
Canada
Canada

n
15
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
3
2
2
1
3
6
6
2
3
4
1
1
1
2
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1

NCII score
407.50
250.50
250.50
250.50
250.50
250.50
250.50
250.50
250.50
250.50
250.50
250.50
244.63
227.30
198.30
190.80
121.93
102.92
102.92
80.23
67.92
67.42
63.00
63.00
63.00
62.93
62.93
62.40
62.40
62.40
62.40
62.40
62.40
60.75
60.75
60.75

f
2211
1002
1002
1002
1002
1002
1002
1002
1002
1002
1002
1002
1243
1173
1092
954
656
408
407
444
291
232
378
378
378
289
310
312
312
312
312
312
312
243
243
243

observe that, for many authors, only one publication

is relevant for the citation index. This underlines
the large impact of a handful of publications in the
field; therefore, the ranking of top authors is strongly
related to the ranking of top publications. Furthermore, the figures indicate that most of the top authors
are currently from the United States and Australia,
which corresponds to the scientometric analysis of
top contributing countries, depicted in Table 3. The
individual impact of authors significantly influences
the impact of research affiliations (see Table 17). Note
that Manjrasoft, a company founded by Rajkumar
Buyya, strongly collaborates with the University of
Melbourne explaining its high impact.

R ESEARCH

PRODUCTIVITY

The evaluation of research productivity is an important measure to identify the most active research
institutes and scholars in the field. The insights may
help, for instance, to build fruitful research collaborations and reflect the global distribution of research.
First we analyze the institutional research productivity. Table 18 shows a ranking of research institutes ordered by the number of contributed publications (f ). The numbers demonstrate the dominance

TABLE 17
Top 15 cited affiliations
R.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15

Affiliation
U. of Melbourne
Vienna U. of Technology
U. of California, Berkeley
Manjrasoft
Tsinghua U.
U. of Chicago
Beihang U.
U. of California, Santa Barbara
Carnegie Mellon U.
U. of Maryland
Arizona State U.
Wayne State U.
U. of Waterloo
Purdue U.
U. of Innsbruck

Country
Australia
Austria
United States
Australia
China
United States
China
United States
United States
United States
United States
United States
Canada
United States
Austria

NCII
555.78
263.17
250.50
193.60
180.62
179.23
176.02
144.28
129.82
124.90
110.97
100.82
100.22
96.63
94.90

f
2382
1172
1002
968
856
1517
713
652
513
659
394
509
385
371
323

TABLE 18
Top 15 contributing affiliations
R.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
15

Name
Beijing U. of Posts and Telecommunications
Tsinghua U.
Beihang U.
Wuhan U.
Northeastern U.
Huazhong U. of Science and Technology
Arizona State U.
U. of Melbourne
National U. of Defense Technology
National Taiwan U.
Purdue U.
Peking U.
Shanghai Jiao Tong U.
Zhejiang U.
Vienna U. of Technology
Nanjing U.

of publications coming from Chinese institutions (as

already demonstrated in Table 3). Most of these
institutions have an excellent overall reputation (e.g.,
University of Melbourne, Peking University, Tsinghua
University) and dispose of sufficient monetary and
personell resources. In sum this provides the basis for
promoting new generations of highly qualified scientists and enables to employ several scientists working
on particular topics, such as in the area of cloud
computing. The concentration of cloud computing
research attracts new generations of scientists as they
may benefit from a broad range of knowledge and
expertise. This effect is consistent with the Matthew
effect as researchers benefit from the intrinsic recognition of their affiliation and the associated network
benefits.
Finally, we perform a scientometric analysis to
evaluate the productivity of authors in the area of
cloud computing. As discussed in Section 2, several methods for measuring the productivity of individual authors exist. In this paper, we focus on
the equal credit method as it seems to be the best
compromise among the discussed methods. Based
on the equal credit method, each individual author

Country
China
Taiwan
China
China
USA
China
USA
Australia
China
Taiwan
USA
China
China
China
Austria
China

f
369
253
172
130
117
106
101
97
96
95
90
84
81
80
78
78

receives a score based on the reciprocal of the number of authors per article, depicted in Table 19. We
observe that most of the top productive individual
contributors are from China (7), United States (6),
Austria (5) and Australia (4). By comparing the results with the results of the author position method
and straight count method, we observe that Rajkumar
Buyya is not only the most influential researcher, but
also the most productive one in the area of cloud
computing. This demonstrates that a high impact
of authors can have a positive effect on the individual productivity as it attracts interest from other
researchers to collaborate in order to benefit from the
authors recognition. Combined with the top cited
publications, the numbers indicate the existence of
the Matthew effect in the area of cloud computing.
Authors who gained high recognition in an early
stage of research development by contributing ideas
and discoveries through using appropriate outlets
are repeatedly rewarded by other scientists.

C ONCLUSIONS

Cloud computing attracts a lot of interdisciplinary attention and is a rapidly developing field of research.

TABLE 19
Individual productivity (equal credit method, score 5.5)
R.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
19
21
22
22
24
25
26
27

Author
Buyya, Rajkumar
Brandic, Ivona
Chen, Jinjun
Puliafito, Antonio
Dustdar, Schahram
Jin, Hai
Rong, Chunming
Petcu, Dana
Huh, Euinam
Srirama, Satish Narayana
Prodan, Radu
Yang, Chaotung
Leymann, Frank
Lee, Sungyoung
Fox, Geoffrey Charles
Tsai, Weitek
Wang, Xingwei
Zhang, Yaoxue
Li, Baochun
Li, Keqin
Villari, Massimo
Deters, Ralph
Zhang, Xuyun
Truong, Honglinh
Schikuta, Erich
Fu, Song
Wang, Yeqiao

Affiliation
U. of Melbourne
Technische U. Wien
U. of Technology Sydney
U. degli Studi di Messina
Technische U. Wien
Huazhong U. of Science and Technology
U. of Stavanger
U. de Vest din Timisoara
Kyung Hee U.
U. of Tartu
U. of Innsbruck
Tunghai U.
U. Stuttgart
Kyung Hee U.
Indiana U.
Arizona State U. (Downtown Phoenix)
Northeastern U. China
Tsinghua U.
U. of Toronto
State U. of New York at New Paltz
U. degli Studi di Messina
U. of Saskatchewan
Huazhong U. of Science and Technology
Technische U. Wien
U. Wien
U. of North Texas
Beijing U. of Posts and Telecommunications

In this paper, we conduct a scientometric analysis

to comprehensively investigate the development and
current state of cloud computing related publications
based on a large bibliographic data basis provided by
Scopus.
The results of this study reveal that past and current research is dominated by computer science research conveyed especially through conference proceedings. The focus of research activities is predominantly influenced by fundamental and highly
recognized scientists and publications. In this regard,
we demonstrate the Matthew effect in the area of
cloud computing. Given the results of the keyword
analysis it is obvious that the past and current
focus of cloud computing research lies mainly on
the technology itself rather than on socioeconomic
issues. Current trends, such as depicted by keywords
related to data analysis and Big Data, demonstrate
the increasing importance of shifting the focus of research to socioeconomic issues to solve understudied
problems and better utilize the potentials of cloud
computing. This may help to increase the overall
value of cloud computing and may facilitate further
adoption in both an academic and practical context.
Thus, the results of the scientometric analysis may
help the relatively new field of cloud computing
to (re-) define itself in order to provide a clear
direction and objectives for research. The analysis of
main contributing affiliations and highly influential
authors and publications may help, especially new
generations of scholars, to get an overview of important publications, topics, outlets and to identify

Country
Australia
Austria
Australia
Italy
Austria
China
Norway
Timisoara
South Korea
Estonia
Austria
Taiwan
Germany
South Korea
United States
United States
China
China
Canada
United States
Italy
Canada
China
Austria
Austria
United States
China

Score
29.360
11.426
10.936
10.525
10.327
9.931
9.461
8.900
8.567
8.250
8.108
7.400
6.947
6.777
6.659
6.410
6.283
6.175
6.033
6.033
5.871
5.833
5.833
5.758
5.700
5.667
5.617

main contributors and driving forces in the area of

cloud computing. Thus, the results of this study
can be used to better understand patterns, trends
and other important factors for directing individual
research activities, efficiently extending research networks and selecting appropriate publication outlets
for sharing individual knowledge.
The empirical findings of the scientometric analysis are partially reflected in widely recognized publications (e.g., relevant topics, research challenges). In
general, this demonstrates the strength of a scientometric analysis to extensively investigate a field of
interest. As demonstrated, the results of the scientometric study are not only valuable for discussing and
defining future research agendas in the area of cloud
computing. Moreover, the semi-automated process
of assessing a large amount of publications makes
it possible to easily obtain a general overview of
a particular research area. This, in contrast, is not
possible with structured literature reviews. Therefore, the study represents a good starting point for
academics and practitioners to identify the sources
and concentration of the existing knowledge base. In
addition, research trends and important topics can be
observed over a specific period of time by means of
keyword analysis.
For further research, we intend to investigate and
visualize collaboration structures among authors as
well as the relationship between topics and authors
in order to better understand the dynamics and
network structure of this field. In this regard, we
aim to analyze the patterns of trends for specific

topics. In addition, we plan to compare the results

with other metrics in order to further evaluate our
results. Technically, we indend to further improve
the applied data processing algorithms in order to
further reduce manual proof-reading activities by
means of data mining and machine learning.

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Leonard Heilig holds a B.Sc. (University

of Munster,
Germany) and a M.Sc. (Univer
sity of Hamburg, Germany) in Information
Systems. Currently he holds a position at
the Institute of Information Systems at the
University of Hamburg. He spent some
time at the University of St Andrews (Scotland, UK) focusing on security management, web technologies and software engineering. Practical experiences include work
at companies like Adobe Systems, Airbus
Group Innovations and Beiersdorf Shared Services. His current
interest focuses on cloud computing. Related applications incorporate mobile workforce management systems.

Stefan Vo is professor and director of

the Institute of Information Systems at the
University of Hamburg. Previous positions
include (full) professor and head of the department of Business Administration, Information Systems and Information Management at the University of Technology Braunschweig (Germany) from 1995 up to 2002.
He holds degrees in Mathematics (diploma)
and Economics from the University of Hamburg and a Ph.D. and the habilitation from
the University of Technology Darmstadt. His current research interests are in quantitative / information systems approaches to
supply chain management and logistics including applications in
maritime shipping, public mass transit and telecommunications. He
is author and co-author of several books and numerous papers in
various journals. Stefan Vo serves on the editorial board of some
journals including being Editor of Netnomics and Editor of Public
Transport. He is frequently organizing workshops and conferences.
Furthermore, he is consulting with several companies.