Bibliometric Mapping of Blockchain-Based Smart Contracts

Abstract

Blockchain technology has gained researchers’ attention in the last few years because of its essential features like peer-to-peer, sharing, and openness. These features have allowed the research community to develop faster, more efficient solutions. This evolving technology is used to record transactions, contracts, and agreements in a peer-to-peer distributed ledger. A smart contract is nothing but a deal that blockchain manages. The provisions of the buyer’s and seller's deal are explicitly written into lines of text. These smart contracts operate in a variety of ways. used in many industries like banking, energy, education, e-government, and many more. As this concept has rapidly evolved in recent years, there is a need to do a detailed study of smart contracts' existing implementation in various domains, their benefits, and related issues. By understanding this need, researchers have conducted bibliometric research on blockchain in the context of smart contracts. For this study, researchers used the Scopus database for bibliometric analysis. The analysis is performed on the articles published in Scopus, indexed resources, and secondary documents (not indexed by Scopus but extracted from the reference list of Scopus). The analysis findings are helpful to the researcher in finding the scope for conducting further research in this domain and offering a substantial basis for their work on smart contracts.