Scientometrics (2019) 120:1289–1331

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03170-4

The rise of “blockchain”: bibliometric analysis of blockchain

study

Ahmad Firdaus1 · Mohd Faizal Ab Razak1   · Ali Feizollah2 ·

Ibrahim Abaker Targio Hashem3 · Mohamad Hazim2 · Nor Badrul Anuar2

Received: 3 March 2019 / Published online: 5 July 2019

© Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2019

Abstract
The blockchain is a technology which accumulates and compiles data into a chain of mul-
tiple blocks. Many blockchain researchers are adopting it in multiple areas. However, there
are still lacks bibliometric reports exhibiting the exploration of an in-depth research pat-
tern in blockchain. This paper aims to address that gap by analyzing the widespread of
blockchain research activities conducted thus far. This study analyzed the Scopus database
by using bibliometric analysis in a pool of more than 1000 articles that were published
between 2013 and 2018. In particular, this paper discusses various aspects of blockchain
research conducted by researchers globally. This study also focuses on the utilization of
blockchain and its consensus algorithms. This bibliometric analysis discovered the follow-
ing: (1) Blockchain able to solve security issues in internet of things (IoT) and would be an
increasing trend in the future; (2) Researchers begin to adopt blockchain in healthcare area;
(3) The most active country in blockchain publication is United States, followed by China
and Germany; (4) Switzerland and Singapore are two small size countries that published
few publications, however receives many citations. (5) Research collaborations between
countries increased the research publications except for Canada, India, and Brazil. (6) Key-
word analysis revealed that researchers are adopting blockchain to solve problems in mul-
tiple categories of the data research area (data privacy, digital storage, the security of data,
big data, and distributed database). This study also highlighted the utilization and consen-
sus of the algorithm in blockchain research.

Keywords  Blockchain · Bibliometric · Consensus algorithm · Security · Review

Introduction

Computer security is an important element in today’s environment. It is used to impede

and overcome an imminent threat which has the potential to cause serious damages to the
computer system or mobile devices. Security practitioners, for instance, conduct various
investigations to optimizing the best features (Feizollah et al. 2015; Mustaffa et al. 2015;

* Mohd Faizal Ab Razak

[email protected]
Extended author information available on the last page of the article

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Mustaffa and Yusof 2012; Rahouma 2017; Hazim et al. 2018) for predictions in machine
learning. Furthermore, they also conduct malware analysis as a measure to combat mal-
ware threats by using either static or dynamic analysis (Hazim et al. 2018; Firdaus et al.
2017a, b; Adewole et al. 2017; Razak et al. 2017, 2019; Firdaus and Anuar 2015; Ahmed
and Zolkipli 2016). Other than malware, money in digital form or ‘Bitcoin’ also require
higher demand for security, which demands a unique framework.
The ‘Bitcoin’ is a digital form of money (cryptocurrency) (Bartoletti et  al. 2019; Wu
et  al. 2019; Hellani et  al. 2018). It has similar functions as fiat money and is used as a
medium to purchase materials, foods, and services (Hughes et al. 2019; Lamiri et al. 2019;
Maesa et al. 2019). It adopts a technology called blockchain which offers transparency and
decentralization (Essaid et al. 2018; Juhász et al. 2018; Parino et al. 2018; da Silva Filho
et  al. 2018; Dennis and Disso 2019). This technology excludes third-party involvement
(reduce transaction costs), has faster transaction time and a distributed ledger. Various
studies have utilized the blockchain technology in various fields of investigation such as
security (Yuan et al. 2018), vehicles (Liu et al. 2018) and healthcare (Griggs et al. 2018),
(Firdaus et al. 2018). These studies have exhibited the critical need to conduct exploration
activities in this domain. Nevertheless, these studies gave lack of attention to the study of
bibliometrics. A significant number of articles have focussed on this research area but they
mainly report on blockchain research impacts and trends only.
Data science and the library domain utilize bibliometrics as a method to identify the
author’s activities, publication trends, and country relations. It is also used to acquire the
information of progress, growth as well as the insight of specific knowledge. This method
contributes to a better association of organization data assets, which are fundamental for
its successful and effective utilization of data management (Dehdarirad et  al. 2015; Wu
et al. 2015; Tahaei et al. 2018). There are numerous advantages of using bibliometrics: (1)
Authors are able to validate the centrality of their publication, exploration, and research;
(2) Institutions are able to assess the publication and measure the quality and impact; (3)
Scientists are able to foresee future research undertakings and the critical effect of research
on specific domains; and (4) Analysts are able to assess the developing body of knowledge.
In demonstrating the evolution of the blockchain domain, this paper offers a comprehen-
sive assessment of the blockchain research practices which have been published in the Sco-
pus database, from 2013 to 2018. The methodology involves an appraisal of the blockchain
studies, topics, publication patterns, and utilization. To fulfill the aim of this paper, the fol-
lowing research questions are articulated: (1) What is the trend of publication in blockchain
study throughout the world? and (2) What information is uncovered from this trend and
what are the future directions of blockchain study?
The scope of this bibliometric analysis of blockchain studies are as follows:

(a) The bibliometric assessment of blockchain involves 1119 studies which were extracted
from the Scopus database which comprises all types of papers including ISI-indexed.
(b) The experiment assesses blockchain research efforts that are recorded in various types
of documents.
(c) This study adopts the dominance factor (DF) rankings to reveal author dominance in
publication; it uses the keywords used by the authors in blockchain research and it also
concentrates on the citations of the authors involved.
(d) This study further investigates blockchain research among countries throughout the
world by evaluating the total number of articles, publications, and citations made within
each country.

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(e) This study emphasizes two useful network connections: (1) Country collaboration
network; (2) Keyword co-occurrences network; and (3) Affiliation collaboration
network. These networks are to explore the connection between the countries,
keywords, and affiliations.
(f) Finally, this study addresses the inclination of blockchain research by summarizing the
blockchain research efforts conducted thus far and then using these to forecast possible
future realizations.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Sect. 2 surveys the related biblio-
metric studies. Section 3 provides the methodology used. Section 4 displays the findings
of this paper. Section  5 provides the utilization of blockchain insights by addressing the
advantages. Section 6 highlights the consensus algorithms involved in blockchain technol-
ogy and Sect. 7 concludes the paper.

Related works

Bibliometrics is a current technique which is used to estimate, analyze and visualize the
construction of scientific fields (Koskinen et  al. 2008). It is engaged for the purpose of
describing the expansion of the desired field in a particular area of knowledge (Liu et al.
2018). It entails making an evaluation of publications such as the impact factor, citations,
publishers, and countries of publication (Lee 2019; Docampo and Cram 2019; Iefremova
et al. 2018). Various studies have applied this method. Table 1 tabulates the list of studies
which adopted the bibliometric analysis as an approach which is similar to our paper. Nev-
ertheless, there are some differences between previous studies and our paper.
Table 2 illustrates the differences that exist between this paper and previous studies.
As shown in the table, (Miau and Yang 2018) engaged Lotka’s law to measure author
productivity. In contrast, the current paper applies to another method called the dominance
factor (DF). In addition, this paper also uses two types of network connections—coun-
try collaboration, keyword co-occurrences, and affiliation collaboration, which have been
omitted by previous studies, as a measure to enhance our bibliometric analysis. To fortify
the value of this paper, we further include a review of the consensus algorithm (Mingxiao
et  al. 2017), presenting multiple types of algorithms such as proof of work (PoW), proof of
stake (PoS), byzantine fault tolerance (BFT), proof of elapsed time (PoET), proof of band-
width (PoB), and proof of authentication (PoAh). To augment the findings of this paper,

Table 1  List of studies that References Fields Year

adopted a bibliometric method
Loomes and Van Zanten (2013) Digestive disease 2013
(Wu et al. 2015) Land-slide studies 2014
(Dehdarirad et al. 2015) Women in science and 2015
higher education
(Mao et al. 2015) Biomass energy 2015
(Fahimnia et al. 2015) Green supply chain 2015
(Razak et al. 2016) Malware 2016
(Miau and Yang 2018) Blockchain 2016
This paper Blockchain 2018

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Table 2  Comparison with previous studies

Differences This paper Bibliometrics of Review of the
blockchain (Miau and consensus algorithm
Yang 2018) (Mingxiao et al.
2017)
Year 2016 2017

Author productivity Lotka’s law ●

Dominance factor ●
Subject ● ●
Documents ● ●
Citation ● ●
Countries ● ●
Network Country collaboration ●
Keyword co-occur- ●
rences
Affiliation collabora- ●
tion
Consensus algorithm PoW ● ●
PoS ● ●
DPoS ● ●
LPoS ●
PBFT ● ●
DBFT ●
PoA ●
PoET ●
PoB ●

we further include additional types of algorithms such as delegated proof of stake (DPoS),
leased proof of stake (LPoS), practical byzantine fault tolerance (pBFT), delegated byz-
antine fault tolerance (DBFT), and proof of authority (PoA). The section below describes
how the bibliometric method was applied.

Methodology

The methodology of this study comprises four phases:(1) Search, (2) Result, (3) Findings,
and (4) Analysis. Figure 1 visualizes the methodology and its stages.
The process of this study begins by using “blockchain” as the main keyword in the
Scopus database. This is to discover the blockchain research direction and the interest of
that database. This study preferred the Scopus database because it contains both the ISI
and Scopus indexed rank papers (Oakleaf 2009). Following this, the result phase was able
to retrieve a total number of 1119 articles that were published between 2013 and 2018.
We concentrated our analysis from 2013 onwards because the blockchain was introduced
during that year. In the subsequent phase of our study, we focused on uncovering the
information. We focused on various aspects which include looking at various document

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Search using Phase 1

keyword
“blockchain”
in Scopus database

1119 articles
Phase 2 (between 2013 and
2018) include:
1) Journals
2) Conferences
Obtain 3) Books
information in: 4) Book sections
Phase 3
1) Types of
documents.
2) Subject area.
3) Authors.
4) Countries.
Phase 4
Analysis and
visualize

Documentation

Fig. 1  Methodology stages

types, subject area, authors, and countries. The last phase of our study performed the
bibliometric analysis and retrieved the results.
This paper adopted the open source statistical application called R to construct the
blockchain bibliometric analysis. Specifically, we installed and used a package known as
bibliometrix (Aria and Cuccurullo 2017) which is available in R desktop application. Mul-
tiple studies have used this bibliometrix tool for their specific research fields (Cirillo et al.
2018; Brito et al. 2018; Arfaoui et al. 2019). In author’s knowledge, this paper is the first
study that adopt this tool to run bibliometric analysis in blockchain. The tool is able to
provides many blockchain findings and based on it, we made visualizations and analyzed
further in the section below.

Bibliometric analysis

The bibliometric analysis of our study is divided into four categories which also carry
multiple sub-categories. The main categories are; (1) Types of documents, (2) Subject
area, (3) Authors and (4) Countries. The sub-categories developed under Authors were: (a)

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Author’s dominance, (b) Author’s keywords, (c) Total citations, (d) Country’s total number
of articles, (e) Country’s publications, (f) Country’s total citations, and (g) Collaboration
networks. These findings are important because they generate the bibliometric information
which can be used to unravel high impact research that contributes to generating new
knowledge for blockchain. Table  3 tabulates the information extracted from the Scopus
database, with 1119 articles published between 2013 and 2018 (May 2018).
As can be seen, these articles were written in 475 sources consisting of journals, books,
conferences, and proceedings. The keywords noted in the articles were twice the number
of the articles, totaling 2024. The number of authors identified from the articles totaled
2227, with 145 single authors in each article and the rest (2082) were articles with mul-
tiple authors in each article. From the year 2013 to May 2018, results showed the number
of articles increasing rapidly. It is expected that by the end of 2018, this number would
increase even more steadily. To display visually, Fig.  2 depicts Table  3 information in a
graph form. The next section elaborates on the sources of the articles and their numbers.

Type of documents

Figure 3 provides information to analyze the different types of documents. It elaborates on

the outcomes according to placements. Here, it can be seen that conference papers carried
a total of 564 documents, noted to be the highest ranking among the others, followed by
Journal Articles which carried a total of 315 documents and Conference Reviews, carrying
a total of 101 documents.

Table 3  Main information
Main information Explanation No.

Articles Total number of articles 1119

Sources (Journals, Books, etc.) The frequency distribution of sources (journals, books, etc.) 475
Author’s Keywords Total number of keywords 2024
Authors
Authors The authors’ frequency distribution 2227
Author Appearances The number of author appearances 3220
Authors of single authored articles The number of single author per articles 145
Authors of multi authored articles The number of authors of multi authored articles 2082
Other
Authors per Article Average number of authors in each article 1.99
Co-Authors per Articles Average number of co-authors in each article 2.88
Average citations per article Average number of citation in each article 1.859
Collaboration Index 2.56
Year
2013 Number of articles in each year 2
2014 8
2015 37
2016 165
2017 663
2018 244

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Fig. 2  Main information in figure form

Fig. 3  Type of documents

Figure 3 envisages a trend that blockchain researchers were most interested in pub-
lishing conference papers which are in the form of proceedings, rather than an accumu-
lation of papers that were published in websites or in book form. The reason is, these
conference papers were submitted before the conference event, and in this manner,
the papers become available to all the participants. This situation allows the readers
to understand the idea behind the papers and where possible, to submit their feedback
after the presentation of the papers when the conference ends. Based on this, the authors
of the conference papers are then able to improve and revise their research ideas based

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on significant feedback. Therefore, conference publications before the conference are

much more useful as it allows the readers to read multiple times and to understand the
research in detail. Following this, the blockchain authors are able to retrieve the audi-
ence feedbacks much better during the conference event. Table 4 and Fig. 4 show that
lecture note is the first place chosen by blockchain researchers to publish their confer-
ence papers.
Lecture notes appear to be the platform where many of the authors submitted their
conferences papers. The table tabulates that it received many publications in confer-
ences when compared to journal articles. As such, (Garcia-Alfaro et al. 2017) refers to
the Lecture Notes in Computer Science that is contained in the proceedings of the First
International Workshop on Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology (CBT 2017)
held in Oslo, Norway, on September 14, 2017, in conjunction with the 22nd European
Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS) 2017. This lecture notes
contained many ideas and novel contributions that involved blockchain technologies.
Other than lecture notes, we able to see the occurrences of all the sources (lecture
notes, ACM and Ceur workshop) maintain except IEEE Access. The figure above
depicts that IEEE Access would mark an increasing value of occurrences in blockchain
publication in the future. On the other hand, the subsequent section highlights the sub-
ject area that attracted the researchers to adopt the blockchain technology.

Table 4  Sources that involves in the blockchain

Top 20 sources No.

Lecture notes in computer science including subseries lecture notes in artificial intelligence and 152
lecture notes in bioinformatics
ACM international conference proceeding series 36
Ceur workshop proceedings 34
IEEE access 27
Proceedings Of The ACM conference on computer and communications security 16
Advances in intelligent systems and computing 15
Future generation computer systems 11
Strategic change 10
Zhongguo Dianji Gongcheng Xuebao proceedings of the Chinese society of electrical engineering 10
Computer 9
Zidonghua Xuebao Acta Automatica Sinica 9
Economist United Kingdom 8
IT Professional 8
Lecture Notes of the Institute for computer sciences social informatics and telecommunications 8
engineering lnicst
Metaphilosophy 8
Business and information systems engineering 7
F1000 research 7
Lecture notes in business information processing 7
Leibniz international proceedings in informatics lipics 7
New economic windows 7

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Fig. 4  Source growth

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Subject area

Figure 5 depicts the subject area that involved blockchain research. As expected, the sub-
ject area that received more attention from researchers was Computer Science, which
marked 828 involvements in blockchain technology. Additionally, the combination of the
two basic Computer Science subjects, Distributed Computing and Cryptography had also
triggered the blockchain innovation.
Distributed computing in computer science area is one of the advantages of the block-
chain. Before blockchain existed, the torrent site had utilized this decentralization element
which seemed to be functioning admirably well. The setback of the torrent site, however,
was that participants were practicing unethical acts. They were posting useless informa-
tion and uploading malicious applications, without being detected or punished. Moreover,
participants in the torrent site who also acted as peers in the network received no incentives
when volunteering their own computer in the torrent network. To overcome this disadvan-
tage, the creator of Bitcoin (Satoshi Nakamoto) then developed his own application which
was able to limit the power of the participants in the network, but at the same time provid-
ing them with incentives by validating the Bitcoin transaction. This led Cryptography to be
one of the elements in the blockchain approach.
Cryptography is a practice which secures people’s private messages—only the sender
and receiver are able to read the messages. To further strengthen the security, two valida-
tions are required: (1) Encryption and (2) Decryption. These two methods involve differ-
ent techniques and encryption keys. A third party is unable to read the private messages
transmitted between the sender and receiver without the proper key to decode the encryp-
tion. Modern cryptography was developed to incorporate numerous sub-fields in computer
science, for instance, data integrity, user authentication, e-commerce, and banking (Kshetri
2017).
The subsequent subject areas of interest are engineering, mathematics, and business
and finally, management and accounting. As Bitcoin and blockchain are closely related to
economy and mathematics, it was inevitable that business, engineering, and mathematics

Fig. 5  Subject areas that involve blockchain

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would also become the subject areas most involved. This is because engineering and
mathematics are subjects that are also included in computer science while business,
management, and accounting are excluded. The normal economy would require monetary
policies, taxation, voting, fiscal policies, and common security defense. Similarly, Bitcoin
also involves inflation (monetary policy), fees (taxation), upgrades (voting), block
size (fiscal policy) and network security (common security defense). Bitcoin provides
transparency and freedom by employing the decentralization method and this coincides
with the centralization that normal banks apply currently.
It is worth to mention that medical and healthcare subject areas are presently com-
bined with blockchain and are receiving keen attention from researchers. The research-
ers give their trust and believe in the potential of blockchain in involving human lives.
Six subject areas related to this include medicine, biochemistry, genetics, and molecu-
lar biology, pharmacology, toxicology and pharmaceutical, psychology, immunology
and microbiology, health professions and nursing (Griggs et al. 2018; Kuo et al. 2017).
In viewing the healthcare area, one of the problems arise in healthcare is the reg-
ulation of the medical data. Currently, the clinical data of patients are digitized but
the regulations and rules protecting the data from being shared with others have not
been emphasized. Before the invention of the blockchain, the staff of healthcare pro-
vider keyed-in the clinical data manually and if regulations allow this such data to be
shared, the system may offer inadequate information and there may be errors derived
from various manual key-in information. This may derive serious outcomes. However,
with the blockchain technology, it able to overcomes this disadvantage. The trusted
and unalterable data noted in the distributed ledger provided by blockchain enables the
accumulation of information encompassing payers, healthcare providers, and pharma-
ceutical manufacturers to be gathered together within a safe and trusted environment.
The blockchain approach offers hospitals these advantages, thereby saving mankind in
the near future. Meanwhile, the subsequent section discusses the author’s information
who contribute knowledge in blockchain research.

Authors

This section identifies the authors who were most active in blockchain research. To
accomplish this, thi section employed the author’s keywords, dominance ranking fac-
tor, and total citations. Table 5 lists the authors with their published articles in the top
20 rankings.
As seen in the table, Xiwei Xu (Governatori et al. 2018; Han et al. 2018; Lo et al.
2018; Liu et al. 2017, 2018; Xu et al. 2016; Weber et al. 2016; Wang et al. 2018) leads
in publication followed by Ingo M. Weber (Rimba et  al. 2017, 2018; Mendling et  al.
2018a, b, Vladimiro Sassone (De Angelis et  al. 2018; Aniello et  al. 2017; Margheri
2018), and Shi Elaine (Pass and Shi 2018). These are the top four authors with eleven,
nine and eight articles respectively. The remainder of the authors were observed to be
publishing eight, seven or six articles in total. Table 5 shows that these authors were
involved in publications, either as the main or corresponding author. It is noted that
some authors were published as the main author only while others were publishing
as co-authors. Therefore, there is a need to measure the contribution power of each
author. This is done by investigating the dominance ranking factor through a number
of factors in the following section.

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Table 5  Authors with a number Number of articles Authors (top 20)

of articles
11 Xu, Xiwei
9 Weber, Ingo M.
8 Sassone, Vladimiro
Shi, Elaine
7 Gao, Zhimin
Kiayias, Aggelos
Kshetri, Nir
Margheri, Andrea
Pass, Rafael
Shetty, Sachin S.
Shi, Weidong
Wattenhofer, Roger P
6 Chen, Lin
Decker, Christian
Fujimura, Shigeru
Liang, Xueping
Lu, Yang
Pinna, Andrea
Staples, Mark D
Tsai, Wei Tek

Authors’ dominance ranking

The dominance factor (DF) is a ratio which measures the fraction of multi-authored
articles in which an author acts as the first author (Kumar and Kumar 2008). There were
many bibliometric studies which utilized the DF factor in their studies (Wu et al. 2015;
Elango and Rajendran 2012). The DF ranking calculates the author’s dominance in pro-
ducing articles. The DF factor is the proportion of a number of multi-authored papers
where the author as first author (Nmf) is divided by the total number of multi-authored
papers of the author (Nmt). In the single author case, this is omitted due to its constant
value of “one” for single authored papers. The mathematical equation for the DF factor
is shown as:
Nmf
DF =
Nmt
Table 6 tabulates the list of authors in the top 20 DF ranking and this is led by Pass
and Shi (2017). who appeared as a first author in six articles and as one of the many
authors in seven multi-authored articles. This ranking continues with Decker C. and
Chen L. The result implies that Pass, Decker, and Chen dominate in their research
team because they appeared as the first author in all their papers (seven for Pass, six for
Decker and seven for Chen, respectively). The tables also indicate that Xu X was ranked
15. Although Xu X appeared to be the top among the eleven multi-authored articles,
the DF calculates that Xu X appeared as the first author only in two articles. Figure 6
depicts the outcome into a figure form.

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Table 6  Author’s dominance
Rank by DF Author Dominance factor Multi authored First authored Rank by
articles

1 Pass Rafael 0.8571429 7 6 15

2 Decker Christian 0.6666667 6 4 19
3 Chen Lin 0.5714286 7 4 8
4 Liang Xueping 0.5 8 4 5
5 Kiayias Aggelos 0.4285714 7 3 10
6 Wang Jian 0.4285714 7 3 17
7 Kshetri Nir 0.2857143 7 2 11
8 Li Xiaoxin 0.2857143 7 2 12
9 Li Yannan 0.2857143 7 2 13
10 Xu Lei 0.2857143 7 2 18
11 Wang H 0.25 8 2 6
12 Zhang Y 0.25 8 2 7
13 Weber Ingo M. 0.2222222 9 2 3
14 Zhang J 0.2222222 9 2 4
15 Xu Xiwei 0.1818182 11 2 1
16 Fujimura Shigeru 0.1666667 6 1 20
17 Liu J 0.1666667 6 1 21
18 Gao Zhimin 0.1428571 7 1 9
19 Margheri Andrea 0.1428571 7 1 14
20 Shetty Sachin S. 0.1428571 7 1 16

Fig. 6  Dominance factor in figure form

Figure 6 illustrates the dominance factor (DF) followed by the value of first authored,
multi authored and rank by articles. As the figure above illustrates, Pass Rafael and Decker
Christian are the top domination in DF ranking. A deeper search indicates that Pass Rafael
is an Associate Professor in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that has
research interests in cryptography and security (Pass 2019). This provides a clear signif-
icant proof because cryptography is a backbone of bitcoin digital currency which adopt
blockchain mechanism. While Decker Christian is a researcher from ETH Zurich who
supervises many students and published multiple publications in bitcoin area (Christian

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2019). This evidence shows that their similar interest in bitcoin able to contribute to pub-
lishing papers and boost the bitcoin advantages at the same time.
The subsequent section discusses the keywords that authors used in their research arti-
cles inclusive of the specific method used and the features or areas displayed in the key-
words that are related to the blockchain.

Author’s keywords

This section provides the information between keywords and blockchain. The researchers
inserted multiple keywords and related it with blockchain in their research articles. This
is an important part as we need to analyze the research trends, identify the research gaps
in the blockchain area and identify the field of research whereas they have their interest to
combined with blockchain.
Table 7 above tabulates the total number of the author’s keywords in the top 20 rank-
ings. The ranking is led by blockchain, followed by Bitcoin, privacy and smart contract.
The smart contract is similar in purpose to a normal contract in the physical world. It dif-
fers in the sense that it is a digital form and is stored within the blockchain system. In
particular, a smart contract is a contract that is coded in a software form which stores rules
for arranging the terms of an understanding, consequently, confirming satisfaction followed
by the execution of the concurred terms. The fundamental thought of the smart contract is
to remove the third party while setting up business relations. This means that the involved
parties construct the agreement and deal directly with each other.

Table 7  Author’s keywords in Author Keywords (top 20) Articles

the blockchain
Blockchain 572
Bitcoin 168
Privacy 60
Smart contract 58
Cryptocurrency 54
Security 53
Smart contracts 50
Internet of things 47
Ethereum 40
Blockchain technology 32
Iot 32
Access control 21
Trust 17
Decentralization 16
Distributed ledger 16
Cryptography 15
Digital currency 15
Authentication 14
Cloud computing 14
Fintech 13

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As an illustration, consider the case of a crowdfunding situation where the project team
shares its products and the smart contract gathers money from the supporters. Once the
project achieves the objective, the smart contract will distribute the money to the project
team according to the agreement of the contract. Alternatively, other than the project devel-
opment, the smart contract is also capable of another type of agreement such as the sharing
of jobs/tasks, gathering of gifts, collecting of donation and setting of goals. In short, people
are able to use the smart contract to receive funds until it reaches its goal. However, if the
project gets fully funded before the deadline, the money that is raised will automatically
go to the product team. If the project fails, the money will automatically go back to the
supporters. Besides the smart contract, another area that attracts researchers to combine
research with blockchain is the internet of things (IoT).
In Table  7, the keywords that involved multiple small devices (comprising a smart-
phone, smartwatch, or sensor nodes) is the internet of things (IoT). There are two similar
keywords in the IoT, both of which refer to the same subject. One tabulates the “Internet of
Things” as 47 and the other tabulates the “IoT” as 32, which is 79 in total. This value of 79
is higher than the keywords of the privacy and smart contract. This outcome proves that the
IoT receives more tremendous attention from researchers. Currently, the number of sensor
nodes in the IoT keeps on increasing; it is continuously used in vehicles, factory, buildings
and modern infrastructure. According to research drawn from the Juniper network, the total
amount of IoT sensors and devices is expected to increase to 50 billion by 2022 (Smith
2018). Hence, researchers need to find an initiative to secure the IoT network while at the
same time validate the transactional processes (Reyna et al. 2018; Makhdoom et al. 2019).
These reasons attract blockchain researchers to conduct experiments and research efforts to
combine IoT with blockchain technologies (Reyna et al. 2018; Li et al. 2017).
On the other hand, Fig. 7 visualizes the word TreeMap of keywords that received block-
chain interest from researchers. It shows that electronic money, bitcoin, cryptography are
the blockchain common keywords. However, other parts of interesting keywords are the
internet of things (IoT), information management, health care, and artificial intelligence.
This proves that researchers are focused to combine with these fields with blockchain. This
indication verifies that the blockchain has potential in securing the IoT sensors, manage
well in information management, save lives in the health care field and predict categories
or classes with artificial intelligence.
Moreover, in the data point of view, the researchers are depending more faith in the
data research area and adopted it with blockchain. The figure above visualizes multiple
keywords that relate with data, for instances; (1) data privacy, (2) digital storage, (3)
security of data, (4) big data, and (5) distributed the database. This visualization shows that
blockchain analyst discover the enormous potential of blockchain in securing important
data from privacy and big data.

Fig. 7  Word TreeMap

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 1304 Scientometrics (2019) 120:1289–1331

Other than TreeMap, in order to relate these multiple combination keywords

in-depth, following figures visualizes a topic dendrogram of keywords with blockchain.
Figure 8 shows a topic dendrogram to observe the hierarchical relationship between
keywords that generates from hierarchical clustering. It is used to allocate the objects to
clusters by measuring the height of the different objects that joined together in branches.
Initially, human in the dendrogram diagram represent the researchers. Other than
human, the remainder objects are the keywords in blockchain articles.
The diagram shows that IoT areas are the different branch with cryptocurrency areas
(miners, electronic money, bitcoin and proof of work). It highlights that the researchers
separate both areas in their research field and shows that they excluding digital money-
interest with IoT fields. Instead, they combined IoT with big data, trusted third parties
and security. Similar to artificial intelligence (AI), they divide AI from cryptocurrency
area and combined it with economic and computer science instead.
Meanwhile, in a security point of view, most of the branches are related to security.
The branches that relate with security is IoT, identification systems, peer to peer, and
supply chains. This verifies that researchers trust the blockchain and included it in their
research to protect IoT data sensors, the identity of people and data of supply informa-
tion from being attacked. In order to summarize overall keywords, the following figure
provides wordcloud to identify the most keywords that attract researches globally.
Figure  9 depicts a wordcloud of keywords included in blockchain article research
papers. The general terms in blockchain are highlighted in the figure, such as electronic
money, bitcoin, cryptography, and peer to peer networks. However, apart from these
general terms, some of the attracted keywords are the internet of things, data privacy,
network security, and distributed computer systems. The cloud depicts that blockchain
have high potential in these research fields and would mark an increment in amount of
blockhain publication in the near future.
Furthermore, the word cloud highlights three areas that involved security, such as;
(1) network security, (2) security commerce, and (3) security of data. It highlights that
security practitioners have trust in blockchain and adopted it in their respected research
field. It also proves that blockchain has the important requirements to protect data from
a malicious attempt by the attackers. The cloud also highlights the data area twice; (1)
security of data and (2) big data. With the help of blockchain technology, security prac-
titioners adopt blockchain with security research field to protect the data from being
breach and access by hackers. Other than word cloud, in the interest to discover which
countries have an interest in the keywords, the following section provides the multi-field
plot between affiliations and keywords in the top 20 ranking.
Figure  10 depicts that certain universities only adopt blockchain on certain areas
only, depends on their expertise. For instances, Zhejiang University is focused on digital
currency and cryptocurrency. Meanwhile, the universities that have an interest in smart
contract are the University of Edinburgh, University of Cagliari, University of College
London, Beihang University and Peking University. While in IoT research, the universi-
ties that conducted it with blockchain are most from the Asia (Keio University, Univer-
sity of South Wales, Beijing University, Tsinghua University, and Nanyang Technologi-
cal University), except the University of Houston and University of New South Wales.
The two universities from the United States (Cornell University and the University of
Houston) are focused on cryptography, network security, security of data, data privacy
and smart contracts.
This plot indicates that universities from Asia have more interest to adopt blockchain in
IoT research, compare to universities from the United States that have more concern in the

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Scientometrics (2019) 120:1289–1331 1305

Fig. 8  Topic dendrogram

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 1306 Scientometrics (2019) 120:1289–1331

Fig. 9  Word cloud of blockchain keywords

Fig. 10  Multi-fields plot between affiliation and keywords

security field. On the other hand, articles related to blockchain that receive attention and
were cited by other researchers are discussed below.

Total citations

Table 8 tabulates the sources or journals that received a number of citation from other arti-
cles, placed within the top 20 rankings. This information noticed certain articles received
many citations in certain years. This shows the trend that certain articles are worth refer-
ring to in specific years only. Many authors also combined blockchain technology with
other areas, hence they only cited papers that were related to their research activities.
From another perspective, it was noted that certain blockchain papers were cited stead-
ily in each year, such as ranking number one and ten (both published in 2013 and received
citations in similar number in each year). This indicates that the papers are competent and
they also cover the main information of the blockchain and are suitable for other research-
ers in their references.

13
 Table 8  Articles that receive citations
Ranking no. Authors with the source (top 20) Total citation (number Total citation
of citation received) per year

1 Decker C; Wattenhofer R, (2013), Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P), IEEE Thirteenth International Conference 92 18.4
2 Zyskind G; Nathan O; Pentland As, (2015), Proceedings of IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops 88 29.33
3 Christidis K; Devetsikiotis M, (2016), IEEE Access 81 40.5
4 Eyal I; Sirer Eg, (2014), Lecture Notes in Computer Science 79 19.75
5 Kosba A; Miller A; Shi E; Wen Z; Papamanthou C,(2016), Proceedings: 2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and 60 30
Privacy
Scientometrics (2019) 120:1289–1331

6 Luu L; Chu D-H; Olickel H; Saxena P; Hobor A, (2016), ACM Conference on Computer and Communications 43 21.5
Security
7 Yuan Y; Wang F-Y, (2016), Zidonghua Xuebao/Acta Automatica Sinica 43 21.5
8 Tschorsch F; Scheuermann B,(2016), IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 41 20.5
9 Gervais A; Karame Go; Wüst K; Glykantzis V; Ritzdorf H; Capkun S,(2016), ACM Conference on Computer and 40 20
Communications Security
10 Moser M; Bohme R; Breuker D, (2013), eCrime Researchers Summit 40 8
11 Yli-Huumo J; Ko D;Choi S; Park S; Smolander K, (2016), Plos One 32 16
12 Zhang N; Wang Y; Kang C; Cheng J; He D,(2016), Zhongguo Dianji Gongcheng Xuebao/Proceedings of the 29 14.5
Chinese Society of Electrical Engineering
13 Spagnuolo M; Maggi F;Zanero S, (2014), Lecture Notes in Computer Science 29 7.25
14 Azaria A; Ekblaw A; Vieira T; Lippman A,(2016), Proceedings of International Conference on Open and Big Data 28 14
15 Xu X; Pautasso C; Zhu L; Gramoli V; Ponomarev A; Tran Ab; Chen S, (2016), The Working IEEE/IFIP Conference 27 13.5
on Software Architecture (WICSA)
16 Vukolic M,(2016), Lecture Notes in Computer Science 26 13
17 Croman K; Decker C; Eyal I; Gencer Ae; Juels A; Kosba A; Miller A; Saxena P; Shi E; Sirer Eg; Song D; 23 11.5
Wattenhofer R,(2016), Lecture Notes in Computer Science
18 Iansiti M; Lakhani Kr,(2017), Harvard Business Review 21 21
19 Pilkington M, (2016), Research Handbook on Digital Transformations 21 10.5
20 Decker C; Wattenhofer R, (2015), Lecture Notes in Computer Science 21 7
1307

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 1308 Scientometrics (2019) 120:1289–1331

In noting the highest source from the table, it is obvious that lecture notes in computer
science (LNCS) comprise five jotted papers. This proves that this source provides most of
the blockchain information, therefore, many authors refer to lecture notes in their citations.
This source chooses and publishes the latest research in multiple areas of computer sci-
ence in distinguished conferences, proceedings, and series. The LNCS has two subseries:
(1) Lecture notes in artificial intelligence (LNAI); and (2) Lecture notes in bioinformatics
(LNBI). The LNCS is indexed in digital bibliography & library project (DBLP), ISI con-
ference proceedings citation index, Scopus, engineering index (EI), and Google scholar.
Besides the LNCS, there are more conference sources in the top 20 papers in the table.
The top three were the IEEE Thirteenth International Conference, the IEEE Security and
Privacy Workshops, and the IEEE Access. Most of these conferences require minimal time
in their review process and they also require a low number of pages. In comparison, the
journal review procedure of a worthy journal takes a longer time. This explains why many
authors prefer to record their original ideas and research method in conferences before they
continue to update their conference paper information to the journal level. By practicing
this, they are able to preserve their novelty in their research, making other researchers una-
ble to duplicate their ideas in blockchain technology. Besides conferences, there are also
researchers who were interested in publishing blockchain studies in journals such as the
Plos one and the IEEE access. The reason is that both are open access journals.
As seen in the table, the sources for articles that received citations encompass the IEEE
Thirteenth international conference (row one), the IEEE security and privacy workshops
(row two), the IEEE Access (row three), and the IEEE symposium on security and pri-
vacy (row five). These top five IEEE sources have outstanding citations of higher than 50
citations in total. This indicates that conferences attract more researchers to publish their
blockchain research and the most highly cited conference source is the IEEE. Meanwhile,
other than citation, the following section below discusses which country is involved in
blockchain research.

Country

This section deliberates the countries that involved in blockchain research. It highlights the
author’s country that recorded in the publications. It comprises the country’s total of arti-
cles, publications, total of citations, and collaboration network. The following sub-section
begins with the country total of articles.

Country total of articles

Figure 11 visualizes the countries involved in blockchain research. The first ranking coun-
try is the United States with total articles of 103, China (71) and Germany (42). It is worth
to mention that these three countries are located in different continents; (1) the United
States represents North and south America; (2) China represents the best ranking country
in Asia; and (3) Germany marks the highest publication among other countries in Europe.
This information states that each continent has a leading country in blockchain research
activities.
The figure also depicts that the blue color exists more in multiple countries in the
Europe continent. This shows that the countries in Europe (United Kingdom, Germany,
and Italy) adopted blockchain in their research paper more than other continents. Fur-
thermore, more countries in Europe are attempt to involve in blockchain research as

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Scientometrics (2019) 120:1289–1331 1309

Fig. 11  Total of articles in the country

many small blue colors exist surrounding the continents. This evidence shows that the
number of blockchain researchers are increasing in Europe and would expect more pub-
lications in the near future.
Certain countries such as Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Algeria, and Venezuela were excluded.
It is important to note that Venezuela is a country that currently faces an economic crisis
and its money has less value. Therefore, they utilize cryptocurrency coin and currently
practices blockchain in their daily lives. The digital cryptocurrency is referred to as petro
(PTR) (Gusson 2018; Memoria 2019). The Venezuela government launched the PTR to
overcome its economic crisis. As a result of this situation, universities in Venezuela were
unable to join the blockchain research. Thus, Fig. 11 is unable to mark any publication in
Venezuela.
Besides the Europe continent, Asia is also actively involved in blockchain research. As
shown by the significant blue colors and a total number of articles; China, South Korea,
Japan, and Australia are countries that lead in Asia continent. Compare to other countries
on this continent, this figure indicates that these countries are able to discover the true
potential of the blockchain and contributed their idea in publications.

Country publications

This section discusses the blockchain articles in terms of single and multiple publications
for each country. It also aims to observe the collaboration network occurring in various
countries in publishing blockchain articles. Table 9 shows that only certain countries pub-
lished in their own country without collaborating with others, for instances, Canada, India,
and Brazil. Almost all other countries prefer to publish in single articles, with only a few
articles that are shared between countries. The table displays that the top three leading
countries are the United States, China, and Germany.
Figure 12 provides the information in the graph for more illustrious and easier observa-
tions. It offers an insight into the information which encompasses both single country pub-
lications (SCP) and multiple country publications (MCP).

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 1310 Scientometrics (2019) 120:1289–1331

Table 9  Country with blockchain Country (top 20) Articles SCP (single coun- MCP (multiple
publications try publications) country publica-
tions)

United States 103 86 17

China 71 56 15
Germany 42 30 12
United Kingdom 38 30 8
Italy 31 21 10
Japan 31 27 4
Switzerland 31 24 7
Korea 29 26 3
Australia 26 20 6
France 17 11 6
Canada 16 16 0
India 16 16 0
Singapore 12 8 4
Austria 11 7 4
Taiwan 11 9 2
Spain 9 4 5
Netherlands 8 6 2
Brazil 7 7 0
Denmark 7 4 3
Estonia 6 3 3
Hong Kong 6 2 4

Fig. 12  Country with publications in figure form

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Scientometrics (2019) 120:1289–1331 1311

In MCP and SCP points of view, Fig. 12 shows that the United States marked the high-
est spot, which indicates that this country actively published in both single and multiple
publications, followed by China and Germany.
However, in the MCP perspective, the figure shows that several countries have less inter-
est in publishing with other countries. These countries include Brazil and Canada which
are marked with zero MCP. In contrast, they showed more interest in publishing in the SCP
range as the publication values in the SCP were more than one. It is interesting to note that
the highest values in the MCP were less than the SCP, which is 17 and 86 respectively.
This trend proves that most countries are more interested in collaborating and publishing
blockchain research in a single rather than multiple countries.
However, there is one country which chose to collaborate with other researchers. Hong
Kong was noted to be the lowest among all countries in SCP, which published only two
papers. Nevertheless, Hong Kong showed interest in joining and collaborating with other
countries since it published four papers in the MCP region. This value demonstrates
that Hong Kong is more comfortable to collaborate with other countries in blockchain
publications.

Country collaboration map

Figure 13 depicts the country collaboration throughout the world with blue color indicates
as there is collaboration exists in that country. The dark blue shows a higher frequency
of collaboration with other countries. The countries that actively collaborate with other
countries are United States, United Kingdom, German, Italy, France, China, and Australia.
The map indicates that the United States is the country that collaborates most by engaging
almost all active countries in publishing research in blockchain, followed by China and a
few countries in Europe. It demonstrates that collaborations among countries will able to
increase the amount of publications, compare to publications in a single country.

Fig. 13  Country collaboration map

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 1312 Scientometrics (2019) 120:1289–1331

Country total citations

This section reveals the blockchain publications which received citations from other
researchers in the top 20 rankings, globally. Table  10 tabulates the total and average
article citations values. It sorts by the total of citation from the highest to lowest. It lists
the United States marked the top place followed by Germany and Switzerland.
Table  10 illustrates that certain countries received low total citations, but received
high average article citations value. The involved countries are Finland (32–8), Singa-
pore (71–5.9167), and Switzerland (149–4.8065). This evidence shows that these three
countries published a low number of articles, however, received significant citations
worldwide in each article. It also shows that these countries published a good research
quality of blockchain articles rather than quantity.
However, Fig.  14 visualizes both total and average citations. It highlights the total
citations with blue color and the average citations in circle form.
In comparison with the previous Sect.  (4.4.2—country publication), Switzerland
only published 31 articles but it received an outstanding citation of 149. It surpasses
China which published a higher total of articles but received a lower citation score than
Switzerland. This is similar to Singapore, which only published 12 articles but had
received citations higher than the United Kingdom.
The information revealed that Switzerland and Singapore had published in high
quality journals, thereby attracting other researchers to cite and refer. In the interest to

Table 10  Country with a total of Country Total citations Average arti-

citations cle citations

United States 326 3.165

Germany 160 3.8095
Switzerland 149 4.8065
China 128 1.8028
Singapore 71 5.9167
United Kingdom 63 1.6579
Japan 54 1.7419
Australia 50 1.9231
Italy 36 1.1613
Finland 32 8
Austria 22 2
Korea 21 0.7241
Estonia 15 2.5
Morocco 15 7.5
Denmark 13 1.8571
France 12 0.7059
Norway 12 2.4
Hong Kong 11 1.8333
Netherlands 11 1.375
Canada 10 0.625
New Zealand 6 3

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Scientometrics (2019) 120:1289–1331 1313

Fig. 14  Country with total citations in the world map

discover the relationship between these countries, the following section provides net-
work collaboration between countries, keywords, and affiliations.

Network

This section provides the bibliometric analysis of the blockchain in network form. It
consists of country collaboration and keyword co-occurrences network. This network
was constructed so as to be able to observe the movement of the different nodes that are
connected to each other.

Country collaboration network

In the interest of detecting the countries that were actively collaborating with each
other, Fig. 15 provides a record of networking circles of collaboration. Collaboration is
a network that will indicate how the authors are linked to the network as a result of their
co-authorships (Glänzel and Schubert 2004).
The colored circle noted in each node of the network, as shown in the figure,
represents the total number of articles. The figure depicts that the USA is a country
that collaborates most in publishing blockchain articles followed by China, the United
Kingdom, German, Italy, and Switzerland. The figure also revealed that many lines are
connected to each other in the upper part of the collaboration network. This reveals
that the countries in the upper part were actively collaborating with each other when
compared to countries in the lower part. Most of the countries in the upper part were
from the Asian region, such as Malaysia, Singapore, China, Indonesia, New Zealand,
Australia, India, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Japan, and Korea. This implies that
countries in the Asian region preferred to collaborate with others when publishing
articles in blockchain research activities, rather than publishing in a single country.

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 1314 Scientometrics (2019) 120:1289–1331

Fig. 15  Country collaboration layout network

Keyword co‑occurrences network

Noted in the publications, it is crucial for each published article to include keywords after
the abstract. These keywords consist of the research fields that were involved in the respec-
tive articles. Figure  16 provides the information to uncover which fields were related to
blockchain research. It establishes the keyword co-occurrences of the network.
As shown in the figure, the authors include ‘block-chain’ as a keyword more than
‘blockchain’. The reason is that in previous years, blockchain is a new term, therefore it
was excluded in the global dictionary. Hence, there are differences in the keyword. None-
theless, both terms refer to the same word, which is blockchain. The figure depicts that
the researchers combine blockchain with multiple keywords, indicates that they combine
blockchain with multiple areas of research. The common areas that combined with block-
chain are electronic money, bitcoin, cryptography, and bitcoin.
Additionally, the most involved keywords, after blockchain, are electronic money,
cryptography, data privacy, digital storage and internet of things. This information
reveals that researchers conduct blockchain for electronic money as their first attempt.
Subsequently, they would relate blockchain to other fields such as cryptography, data, and
the internet of things (Husain et al. 2018; Cherian and Chatterjee 2019; Li and Shang 2019;
Jennath et al. 2019).
The keyword co-occurrences network further recorded three different words in different
capitalizations. The words include; (1) Internet of things (IoT). (2) Internet of thing (IoT).
(3) Internet of things. To be precise, the researchers were referring to the same field, which
is IoT. Previous section in this paper (4.3.2—Authors keywords) also witnesses a high
demand of blockchain in the IoT field. This evidences provide information that the trend of
combination between IoT and blockchain is outstanding and the amount of publication in
these fields would be increase in the near future (Ryu et al. 2019; Chen et al. 2019; Casado-
Vara et al. 2019; Roman and Ordieres-Mere 2019; Kim et al. 2019).
The analysis further showed that researchers also have the interest to combine
blockchain with healthcare fields. This proves that blockchain has a competent security

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Scientometrics (2019) 120:1289–1331 1315

Fig. 16  Keyword co-occurrences network

structure and the security practitioners have confidence in using blockchain and able to
improve and save human lives. Other than country and keyword network collaborations,
the next section provides affiliation collaboration network to discover the collaboration
between universities.

Affiliation collaboration network

The colored node in the network, as shown in Fig. 17, represents the collaboration of net-
work between universities and colleagues from different countries. The University College
London from the United Kingdom collaborates with the London School of Economics.
While, the purple color node represent five institutes that have collaboration between Air
Force Research Laboratory, Tennessee State University, Old Dominion University from the
United States of America, Institute of Information Engineering and University of Chinese
Academy of Sciences from China. The red color node represents the collaboration between
the National University of Defense Technology, Qingdao Academy of Intelligent Industries
from China and Institute of Automation from Jerman.
This figure reveals that the universities in China preferred to collaborate with their own
country, compare to others. The reason is when referring to Sect. 4.3.2 (Author’s keyword)
and in addition with this figure, these demonstrate that they have the similar interest
which is to explore the potential in IoT with blockchain research. In order to provide more
information in a blockchain, the following section describes how it works and its utilization
(Drosatos and Kaldoudi 2019; Estrada-Galinanes and Wac 2019; Lopes and Pereira 2019;

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 1316 Scientometrics (2019) 120:1289–1331

Fig. 17  Affiliation collaboration network

Dwivedi et al. 2019; Vazirani et al. 2018; Al Omar et al. 2019; Cao et al. 2019; Chen et al.
2019; Alonso et al. 2019).

Utilization of blockchain

In general, the most common attraction of the blockchain is cryptocurrency (digital

money). Nevertheless, research analysts from the government sector, corporate organiza-
tions, security institution as well as industrial segment are able to extend the potential of
blockchain and its interests well beyond the domain of cryptocurrencies. These domains
using blockchains encompass the record transactions, smart contracts, and data purposes.
Figure 18 illustrates these interests in chronological order.

Phase 1

As shown in the Fig.  18, phase one begins with a request to broadcast for peer-to-peer
(P2P) network nodes in the blockchain network. This is the initial phase where the decen-
tralization of authentication takes place. In cryptocurrency @ digital coin situation, when
person A click the submit button to send bitcoin to person B, the request will start and
proceed to phase two.

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Scientometrics (2019) 120:1289–1331 1317

PHASE 3
Once the verification is
The verified transaction
complete, the transaction
may involve any related
is chained to a series of

PHASE 2

PHASE 4
information such as:
block data (blockchain)
Known
for the ledger.
algorithms
validates the
transaction nodes

cryptocurrency records

A new block is added in

Someone begin a
the blockchain and

PHASE 5
PHASE 1

request in the
data therefore unalterable and
blockchain contracts permanent.
transaction and
broadcast to all peer-
to-peer (P2P)
network nodes
(computers)

Transaction
is complete.

Fig. 18  How blockchain works

Phase 2

The following phase is where the algorithm is done to validate the transaction. In
cryptocurrency example, it is important to validate each transaction to avoid any person
to spend the digital coin twice or double-spending. Examples of the algorithms used
are SHA-256, Blake, Crypto Night, and Equihash. Table  11 addresses Proof of work
(PoW) algorithm for each digital coin. These validation algorithms also are known as a
consensus algorithm. Section 6 discusses this information in detail.
On the other hand, another situation in the blockchain network, such as property
matters (land, car, and house), the blockchain developer may use other than validation
algorithm. Instead, they would apply lawyer approval to validate each transaction either
legal or illegal. If the lawyer disapproves it, this process will unable to proceed to the
next phase. However, if the lawyer checks all the requirements and approve, the follow-
ing phase (phase three) will initiates.

Table 11  Cryptocurrency and its Cryptocurrency Algorithm

PoW algorithm
Bitcoin (btc) Secure hash
Bitcoin cash (bch) algorithm
(SHA-256)
Ethereum (eth) Ethash
Litecoin (ltc) Scrypt
Dash (dash) X11
Zcash (zec) Equihash
Monero (xmr) CryptoNightR

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 1318 Scientometrics (2019) 120:1289–1331

Phase 3

Phase three is where the blockchain involves the interest elements (cryptocurrency, records,
contracts, and data). Table  12 tabulates the different situations with different interest
elements that store in each block in the blockchain network. In cryptocurrency situation,
each block may involve information such as the timestamp of the transaction and amount
of coin spent, Meanwhile, in records example, each block may keep the information of the
person that enter and leave the vault room. While the contract situation, each block saves
the information between the private sector and government contract. While for the data
example, each block will save the weather data that collected from the weather sensor. This
situation will fall in the IoT area, which many researchers have many interest on this as
explained in previous section (Sect. 4.3.2). Once phase three is done, the following step is
the phase four.

Phase 4

In phase four, this is where the blockchain network store and begin to chain the data
together with the previous block. Once it chained, any user is unable to tamper or change
the data. If any situation needs to change the information on the block, therefore the user
needs to create another block as usual process similar to phase one. Then, the new block
needs to mention that there is a correction in the respective block and the update informa-
tion is provided in this new block.
All the information in all the blocks are available in block explorer. It considers as public
ledger for public reference and this record is permanent. The ledger is then distributed to
all the participants in the blockchain network and all the computers (nodes) in this network
have similar data. It is because the blockchain used P2P features which adopt decentralized
databases. With these features, it is good for security because if one computer (server)
is attacked, other computers have the backup data. For instance, in cryptocurrency data
example, Table  13 tabulates the transaction of the digital coin in different websites with
different servers installed, but once it participated in the similar blockchain network,
they provide the equivalent data information on-the-fly (live). Each website will provide
the same current block, for example, block 712562. After another transaction is done, the
block will increase one block, and the latest bock will turn to 712563. And all the website
will provide the latest block which is 712563.

Phase 5

In phase five, all the information in the blockchain continues to increase from time to time
depends on the activities. If there is no activity, the number of the block will still remain

Table 12  Interest elements saved Situations Example of interest elements to store in each block
in a block according to certain
situations
Cryptocurrency Timestamp and amount of coin (date, price)
Records Vault records information (staff number, date, time)
Contracts Government contracts information (time, meeting
location, agreement information)
Data Weather sensors data (temperature, humidity)

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Scientometrics (2019) 120:1289–1331 1319

Table 13  Each cryptocurrency Cryptocurrency Block explorer link

with its block explorer
Bitcoin https​://block​explo​rer.com/
https​://live.block​cyphe​r.com/btc/
https​://btc.com/
Bitcoin cash https​://bch.btc.com/
https​://block​chair​.com/bitco​in-cash/block​s
https​://block​dozer​.com/
Ethereum https​://ether​scan.io/
https​://block​scout​.com/eth/mainn​et/
https​://block​chair​.com/ether​eum

without addition. The data in it is constantly updated and all the computers have the lat-
est copy of the data (Marsal-Llacuna 2017). Therefore, the history of the data is all avail-
able from the first block until the latest block. This is useful for audit and monitoring the
activities. Hence, blockchain is useful in many areas such as IoT, property records and vote
system.

Consensus algorithm

In order to update the ledger, the blockchain network needs to achieve a consensus by uti-
lizing an algorithm. From the cryptocurrency point of view, all the participants in the dis-
tributed network need to agree to the consensus. This is to avoid any double-spending on
the value. Agreeing with the consensus means that in the blockchain distributed network,
it is indicated that every participant agrees on the latest status in the ledger (current money
value in every account) and every one of them confirms that there is no double-spending
happening.
In other words, the consensus is a favored word that signifies “general agreement”
which is an imperative part of blockchain innovation. Rather than having a specialist to
keep accounts and bringing the things together in a single element, similar to a bank or
concentrated online payment framework, the digital currency utilizes appropriated records
or blockchain to record data. In this way, the blockchain system needs the general agree-
ment to record data such as the balance accounts of each address, exchanges, and transac-
tion activities. All the consensus algorithm mechanisms intend to secure the system by
making it costly to assault the system and more gainful to help secure it (Li et al. 2017).
In Fig. 19, there are five types of consensus algorithms (Mingxiao et al. 2017): (1) proof
of work (PoW), (2) proof of stake (PoS), (3) byzantine fault tolerance (BFT), (4) proof of
elapsed time (PoET), (5) proof of bandwidth (PoB) and (6) proof of authentication (PoAh).
Table 14 summarizes and differentiate between all these algorithms.

Proof of work (PoW)

Proof of work (PoW) is one of the consensus algorithms that solves the mathematical
algorithms by guessing the answer. The computer that has high computational power
will have faster guessing and high possibility to guess the right answer. Then, the person
who owns that computer will receive an amount of money in digital currency as a reward.

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 1320 Scientometrics (2019) 120:1289–1331

Consensus
algorithm

Proof of Proof of Byzantine fault Proof of elapsed Proof of Proof of

work (PoW) stake (PoS) tolerance (BFT) time (PoET) bandwidth (PoB) authentication
(PoAh)

Delegated Practical byzantine

proof of fault tolerance
stake (DPoS) (pBFT)

Leased proof
of stake Delegates
(LPoS) byzantine fault
tolerance (dBFT)

Proof of authority
(PoA)

Fig. 19  Taxonomy of the consensus algorithm

Searching for an answer to the mathematical problem is similarly like a game, essentially
an amusement. Whoever initially finds the answer derived from the consensus algorithm
will be the first to be rewarded.
In PoW, the miners are unable to hack the system as they apply the real physical
resources to solve the algorithm problems. The examples of the real physical system
are graphical processing unit (GPU) and application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC)
machine (Bitmain 2019). These machines consume a high amount of electricity and
energy. From an ecological point of view, this is not ideal as it causes the miners to have
high energy costs while also being harmful to the environment unless renewable sources
are used. The fact is that it requires a considerable amount of computing power which is
more than what the average person is able to afford. Hence, the researchers invented an
alternative known as the green consensus algorithm, called the proof of stake (PoS), to
overcome these problems.

Proof of stake (POS)

Similar in objective to the PoW, the PoS is a method to validate the blockchain transac-
tions. However, the difference is PoS use coins instead of computational power. PoS algo-
rithm executes its method by allocating the miner coins on a block in order to validate
the transaction. The algorithm chooses the miners according to the number of the miner’s
coin which they just allocated and for the duration they hold. The miners simply need to
demonstrate that they have a specific level for every accessible digital coin. Then, they
will receive rewards. This PoS method would be faster and more productive than the PoW
framework. Due to the fact that anyone can become a miner, the PoS method also offers a
straight scale with regards to the level of the block which a miner can affirm on the grounds
that it depends on the digital coin owned. For instance, Ethereum decided to change from
the PoW to the PoS framework to affirm transactions because of the PoS advantages. Other
than the PoW and PoS, researchers have also constructed the practical byzantine fault toler-
ance (pBFT) as an another alternative method.

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 Scientometrics (2019) 120:1289–1331

Table 14  Differences between consensus algorithm

PoW PoS BFT PoET PoB PoAh

Based on Mining staking coin Exchange message Lottery system Bandwidth Authentication
between untrusted
parties
More information The person that solves The person that own Achieve consensus Where each and every Contributing the band- Achieve authentication
the mathematical big amount of coin among multiple node is similarly width capacity to from its source and
equation first will get will validate the parties without trust likely to be a winner verify the system who authenticate the
the coin as rewards transaction each other block first
Energy consumption High Low Depends on the activi- Low Depends on the activi- Low
ties ties
1321

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 1322 Scientometrics (2019) 120:1289–1331

Delegated proof of stake

Designated proof-of-stake (DPoS) is much more advanced than the PoS system. The DPoS
utilizes a notoriety framework and real-time voting to accomplish the agreement. The par-
ticipants vote for super representatives to secure their system and the DPoS will reward
the super representatives by validating exchanges for the following block. As such, in the
tron (TRX) digital coin example, there will be a decision to pick 27 super representatives
with a yearly reward pool of 1,009,152,000 TRX (Tron Live 2018). The primary difference
between the DPoS and PoS is that the participants in the former network have more gov-
ernance rights in the system.
Since the vote in the DPoS is continuous and on-going, it is observed that if the super
representatives act badly or perform an unscrupulous act, the community in the network
will be able to expel their votes, basically terminating the bad representatives. The super
representatives should attempt their best to comply with all obligations and to keep the
system up as high as conceivable. Otherwise, the community or participants in the network
may reject the super representatives. The advantages of the DPoS are its decentralized
convention that is vote based, its self-governing participants in the network, the free
elections, and its general legitimacy.

Leased proof of stake (LPoS)

In the general viewpoint of the PoS, the participants in the network who keep and hold
small balances are excluded from staking a block. This is because it would consume years
to generate a block which also depends on luck situations. This implies that the holders
with low balance were excluded from running a node; they are left to keep the system up to
a higher balance as owned by bigger players. Therefore, this is where the LPoS advantage
come in.
Since network security is much better when there are more participants, the LPoS con-
siders these little holders who join in running a node together with the bigger holders. The
LPoS accomplishes its mechanism by enabling holders to rent or lease their balances in
order to join the network in staking the nodes. The leased funds stay in the full control
of the holders. They are able to move or invest any time according to their needs or until
the lease point ends. Leased coins increase the ‘weight’ of the staking node, expanding its
chances of being included and being allowed to add a block of the transaction. The LPoS
will then reward the leasers by dividing the amount of the lease proportionally.

Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT)

The BFT is based on the Byzantine’s generals case in a war. It gathers the respective gen-
erals who wish to achieve an agreement in attacking the country. Therefore, they need to
choose either to commence an attack or to withdraw. Depending on the situation and expe-
rience of each general, some may prefer to assault, while others may prefer to withdraw.
This is a crucial decision as the war could turn into a defeat and become more terrible than
when it suffers an organized assault or through a planned withdrawal. Many researchers
mentioned this algorithm in software-defined network research (Yuan et al. 2018). Due to
the advantages offered by these Byzantine war case, crypto researchers began adopting it

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Scientometrics (2019) 120:1289–1331 1323

in blockchain research as another consensus algorithm, for example, practical byzantine

fault tolerance (PBFT) and delegated byzantine fault tolerance (DBFT), to aid in validating
transactions (Gramoli 2017).

Practical byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT)

In 1999, Miguel Castro and Barbara Liskov introduced the practical byzantine fault toler-
ance (PBFT) as improvements in optimizing research (Castro and Liskov 1999). It was
used to improve the original byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) mechanism. The algorithm
works in asynchronous systems which are similar to the Internet mechanism which com-
bines the imperative optimizations that enable it to perform proficiently. The algorithm
adopts an efficient authentication scheme which is public-key cryptography, based on mes-
sage authentication codes during the normal operation. This type of cryptography is able to
avoid latency and throughput bottleneck.

Delegated byzantine fault tolerance (DBFT)

The delegated byzantine fault tolerance (DBFT) consensus algorithm acknowledges two
kinds of participants in the blockchain system: (1) Professional node operators (execute
nodes as a source of income); and (2) Participants who are interested in accessing block-
chain advantages. Consequently, this algorithm verifies the block transaction by running
through a consensus game held with specialized bookkeeping nodes, which constructs
the delegated voting process. In the first step of the verification, the algorithm pseudo-
randomly appoints the bookkeeping nodes. This is a kind of version that broadcasts to the
rest of the network. If 2/3 of the remaining nodes agree with this kind of version, the DBFT
will consider it as secure and the blockchain system will proceed to the next step. If less
than 2/3 of the network agree, a different node is appointed to broadcast its version of the
truth to the rest of the system, and so forth until the algorithm finishes establishing the con-
sensus process.
By implementing this kind of consensus algorithm, it is impossible for any system to
attack unless a majority of the network agree in committing financial suicide. The system
is fork proof, and at every given moment, only one version of the truth exists. Without
complicated cryptographic puzzles to solve, the nodes operate much faster and are able to
compete with centralized transaction methods.

Proof of authority (PoA)

The proof of authority (PoA) (De Angelis et  al. 2018) is another group of BFT consen-
sus algorithm which has drawn the researcher’s responsiveness due to its advantages of
execution and toleration to faults. Parity (Authors 2018) and Geth (Authors 2018) are the
two well-organized customers for permission setting of Ethereum that currently utilizes
the PoA. In particular, the calculation of the algorithms works in rounds during which an
elected party acts as the mining leader. The leader is responsible for proposing a new block
to achieve a distributed consensus. Unlike the PBFT, the PoA requires fewer message
trades hence, it gives better executions. Nevertheless, the real outcome of such execution
change is quite hazy, as far as accessibility and consistency are concerned in ensuring a
reasonable long-run synchronous system model.

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 1324 Scientometrics (2019) 120:1289–1331

Proof of elapsed time (PoET)

The proof of elapsed time (PoET) is also one of the consensus algorithms that avoid
high resource utilization and high energy consumption. This is done by implementing
a fair lottery system. It completes the consensus of each potential validator node that
demands a secure random, holding up time from a trusted execution condition which is
already implemented into the computing platform, such as Intel’s SGX.
Intel, the renowned chip producing giant, developed the PoET idea in early 2016.
It offers a readymade innovative instrument to solve the computing issue of “random
leader election”. Intel SGX is specific hardware equipment that is able to create a verifi-
cation that was set up accurately in a secure area. For instance, if an outsider party uses
the verification to verify or check whether the correct code is operating in the correct
way, the system allows the network participants to demonstrate to different participants
that it is operating the right trusted code for the network. Without this method, it will
be difficult for the network to discover that the participant is truly operating the PoET’s
trusted code. Furthermore, the trusted code keeps on operating in a private environment
which forbids any other application to investigate or inspect the memory space of the
trusted code. This is to guarantees that any unscrupulous participant will be unable to
cheat and control the PoET’s trusted code after it has been set up.
In other words, the PoET is a permission type of blockchain. If this system wishes
to join the network, any forthcoming networking participant must identify him/herself
first. In view of the standard of a reasonable lottery system, where each and every node
is similarly likely to be a winner, the POET system depends on spreading the odds of
winning fairly, over the largest possible number of network participants.
This is achieved by considering the node of the network participant who waits ran-
domly at a certain period of time. The first to finish the assigned waiting time wins the
new block in the blockchain. Once the node in the network generates a random waiting
time, it rests for that predetermined term. The node that wakes up first is the one with
the shortest waiting time. It then commits a new block and it broadcasts the necessary
information to the entire peer distributed network. The procedure is similarly repeated
until the disclosure of the following block. The PoET needs to consider two important
factors; (1) The network participant nodes which truly selects a random number and not
a shorter length, picked intentionally by the participant in order to reach a goal to win
and (2) The winner has truly finished the waiting time.
Basically, the work process is similar to the PoW calculation, but it is without
its power utilization. Rather than being resource intensive, it enables the miners’
processors to rest and change to different tasks for a certain time thereby, increasing its
effectiveness.

Proof of bandwidth (PoB)

Unlike the Bitcoin PoW algorithm, the PoB confirms a verification by depending on the
bandwidth instead of calculation. For instance, in the case of TorCoin (Ghosh et al. 2014),
to mine this coin, a relay transfers the bandwidth capacity over the Tor network. Since
relays are able to sell TorCoin for any existing type of coin, the TorCoin can successfully
remunerate them for contributing the bandwidth capacity to the system, and clients are not
required to pay for the access.

13
Scientometrics (2019) 120:1289–1331 1325

The TorCoin architecture comprises two types of protocol, the TorCoin, and TorPath.
The TorCoin protocol is a Bitcoin variant that mines coins while the TorPath protocol
assigns a circuit that consists of three passages: (1) Passage, (2) Center, and (3) Leave serv-
ers. The TorPath assigns these passages to every customer to approve the TorCoin minting
through verifiable proofs of the bandwidth.

Proof of authentication (PoAh)

Proof of authentication (PoAh), is a consensus algorithm that implements a lightweight

process that PoW (Puthal and Mohanty 2019). In order to achieve that, it consists of two
types of authentication; 1) authenticate the block including its source; and 2) increasing a
special value called as trust value, by adding one value to those that authenticate the block
first. They also claimed that, in comparison with PoS, PoW, and PoA, it has low energy
consumption, low computing, low latency, and low search space. This algorithm is created
to suit the main problem of IoT technologies that frequently need low requirements for
long-lasting operation.

Conclusion

Blockchain is an invention in Bitcoin digital currency and has been received many atten-
tions from blockchain researchers globally. They are able to bring blockchain to higher
levels and adopt it to solve problems in multiple areas. However, there are still lacks biblio-
metric reports exhibiting the exploration of an in-depth research pattern in this area. This
paper has conducted a bibliometric analysis of the blockchain which involves 1119 articles
that were published between 2013 and 2018.
This bibliometric analysis discovers that blockchain researchers were most interested to
publish in conference rather than journal or in book form. The reasons are; (1) They would
like to publish their genuine idea that involves blockchain, (2) To get feedback from the
audience, and (3) To upgrade their conference paper to journal form.
Apart from that, the top author who published most is Xiwei Xu with 11 articles, fol-
lowed by Ingo. M Weber with nine articles. They are the research members in a similar
place (Data61, CSIRO, Sydney, Australia) and therefore easier for them to collaborate and
published articles together. Their interest areas are to combine blockchain in IoT and busi-
ness field. However, they are more involved as multi author compare to main.
Meanwhile, in dominance ranking, the top two rankings are Pass Rafael (main author—
six articles) and Decker Christian (main author—four articles). Pass Rafael is a researcher
in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that have an interest in cryptography,
which is a backbone in the blockchain. While Decker Christian is an author from ETH
Zurich, Switzerland that concentrates on bitcoin, which is a first cryptocurrency that adopts
blockchain.
On the other hand, in blockchain keywords, blockchain analysts are more keen to adopt
blockchain in the Internet of Things (IoT). Before blockchain have been introduced, IoT
receives many security issues to secure data among sensors. Meanwhile, after the research-
ers realized the potential of blockchain, they begin to adopt blockchain in IoT to overcome
it. This evidence shows that blockchain will bring IoT to a higher level and contribute to
more papers published in the near future.

13
 1326 Scientometrics (2019) 120:1289–1331

Apart from IoT, they also apply blockchain in the healthcare research field, which
involves human lives. Among all methods, blockchain receives outstanding attention from
researchers to improve in medical and healthcare research interest. A topic dendrogram in
Fig.  8 shows that they combine healthcare with internet and commerce. It demonstrates
that the researchers are using blockchain to store healthcare data online, and gain profit
with it.
In addition, this paper also discovers that blockchain researchers were adopting block-
chain in data research field such as (1) data privacy; (2) digital storage; (3) security of data;
(4) big data; and (5) distributed database. This proves that blockchain is able to secure data
digitally and make it available online without limitation of size. This is also a reason that
blockchain practitioners adopt blockchain to secure data in IoT and healthcare.
In-country point of view, the top three countries that published more papers in block-
chain research are the United States, China, and Germany. This study also revealed that the
number of blockchain researchers are increasing in Europe and would expect more publi-
cations in the near future. This is because many countries surrounding this continent are
actively participating in blockchain research. It also appears that countries in Asia expect-
edly would participate together in this research. Furthermore, blockchain practitioners in
Asia are more interested to combine blockchain with IoT, while the United States is more
interested in securing data with blockchain.
This study also highlighted the utilization and consensus of the algorithm in blockchain
research. It reviewed the potentials of blockchain which could be expanded to other areas
other than digital currency only.

Acknowledgements This work was funded by Universiti Malaysia Pahang, under the Grant Faculty of
Computer Systems and Software Engineering (FSK1000), RDU180361.

Compliance with ethical standards 

Conflict of interest  The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Affiliations

Ahmad Firdaus1 · Mohd Faizal Ab Razak1   · Ali Feizollah2 ·

Ibrahim Abaker Targio Hashem3 · Mohamad Hazim2 · Nor Badrul Anuar2
Ahmad Firdaus
[email protected]
Ali Feizollah
[email protected]
Ibrahim Abaker Targio Hashem
[email protected]
Mohamad Hazim
[email protected]
Nor Badrul Anuar
[email protected]
1
Faculty of Computer Systems and Software Engineering, Universiti Malaysia Pahang,
26300 Gambang, Kuantan, Pahang, Malaysia
2
Department of Computer System and Technology, Faculty of Computer Science and Information
Technology, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
3
School of Computing, & IT, Taylor’s University, 47500 Subang Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia

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