Answer the questions by text
<questions>
1) their structural parts according to the plan above;
2) the words / phrases that help introduce the relevance and research gap of each study;
3) tenses typical of each part of the Introduction.
</questions>
<text>
Introduction
As a relatively new technology, blockchain emerges in a
variety of forms [1]. Blockchain has attracted wide attention from a
considerable number of scholars who concentrate on blockchain and
witness the explosive research progress in this field. Blockchain is a
foremost tool to deal with all kinds of problems, including security,
transportation, logistics, finance, and so on. Globally, the importance,
security, and worldwide commercial impact of blockchain has
created interest among researchers and inspired us to carry out
this study. Based on this background, acquiring a clear systematic
overview can help scholars to form insights into the characteristics
of blockchain research.
What is blockchain? A common explanation is that blockchain
is viewed as a decentralized scenario where untrusted members
can interact with each other in a verifiable way [2]—[4]. The
development of blockchain has experienced several stages; at the
same time, the ethics and standards of the blockchain industry have
also begun to attract attention. Blockchain standards came into
existence in late 2017. Currently, most blockchain standard activities
focus on specifying and developing common frameworks, interfaces,
and technical modules that work in self-contained or specific platform
environments [5]—[7]. However, no regulations have been proposed
by governments to implement blockchain in different fields. It is a
good initiative to develop a standard framework for blockchain that
could adapt to national legislation for all nation-states [8].
Blockchain technology is highly prevalent today, not only does
it have a commercial impact on people’s work and lifestyle but
also brings enormous opportunities to various fields. For example,
health is an important field that the public concerns and blockchain
technology are conducive to the dramatic improvement in health
record management. Blockchain technology provides secure and
efficient access to medical data by virtue of patients, providers, and
third parties while preserving the patients’ private information [9],
[10]. In data trading platforms, the blockchain solution is useful
for helping to complement and mitigate limitations [11], [12].
The combination of the internet of things (loT) and blockchain
can support high-speed data transfer, especially in a 5G-enabled
industrial environment during information collection and processing
[13], [14]. As the most successful digital currency of blockchain,
the wide adoption of bitcoin in finance and other business sectors
will bring multiple business innovations and diverse research
opportunities [15].
Many scholars have already conducted a great number of state of-the-art studies on blockchain. However, most articles start from
a single perspective: some scholars focus on its evolution [16], [17],
some scholars focus on fundamental theories [6—8], and other
scholars focus on its performance [9], [10]. Although these existing
articles are valuable, they fail to objectively reveal the whole
picture of blockchain or pay due attention to exploring hot research
topics over the past few decades. Worse still, it is highly difficult
to effectively organize, summarize, and quantitatively analyze the
development of a specific field among a large number of studies
on a large time scale in traditional review articles. Blockchain is
an interdisciplinary research field that covers mathematics, finance,
computer science, sociology, and communication science. In order
to get a comprehensive understanding of the progress and hotspots
of blockchain, a bibliometric analysis is needed.
The bibliographic technique is a quantitative analysis of books,
articles, or other publications. In recent years, the bibliometric
analysis has been applied in various professional fields to visualize
the knowledge status, features, evolution, and emerging trends.
This can help interested scholars with a lack of expertise in those
fields which secures a full understanding [18]. Bibliometrics can
present a considerable amount of academic research, which can be
viewed from micro to macro perspective [19]. Based on bibliometric
methods, the performance of various disciplines can be vividly
observable. Therefore, this paper will use the maps generated
by CiteSpace and VOSviewer to conduct a comprehensive and
systematic analysis of blockchain research. CiteSpace usually works
as an effective tool for researchers to extract network relations,
research emphases, as well as research trends. VOSviewer can
present detailed information on the literature, such as hot research
topics.
This research is structured as follows. First, the data source and
methods are introduced. Second, the bibliometric analysis results
are presented from six main aspects, namely, publication outputs,
categories analysis, countries and institutions cooperation analysis,
author collaboration network and author co-citation network, cocitation journals analysis, and cited references analysis. Then, hot
research topics, academic relations, and emerging trends will be
summarized in specific fields. Finally, some conclusions and future
research directions will be proposed.
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