Bibliometric analysis of research output on the internet of things in the Arab world

Abstract

Arab countries understand the importance of the Internet of things for the development of society. This entails many efforts to conduct research related to the Internet of things in the Arab countries. Analysing contributions of researchers to the Internet of things research could be useful to go further in this filed. In this study, bibliometric techniques are used to investigate publications indexed in the Scopus database with the affiliation to the Arab countries. The paper used research outputs of Arab nations as quantitative measure, while it also used citation rates and citation scores for qualitative measure. Data analysis focuses on the growth in the Internet of things research, types of publication, core journals, subject and keyword analysis, top productive authors, top productive institutes and countries, and collaborative countries with the Arab countries. Findings of the study highlighted the differences among the Arab group countries with regard to IoT research. In addition, the Arab nations appeared performing better in IoT research than the environmental and medical research.