Autonomous vehicles: scientometric and bibliometric review

Rodrigo Marçal Gandia (1) , Fabio Antonialli (1, 2) , Bruna Habib Cavazza (2, 1) , Arthur Miranda Neto (1) , Danilo Alves De Lima (1) , Joel Yutaka Sugano (1) , Isabelle Nicolaï (3, 2) , André Luiz Zambalde (1)

1 UFLA - Universidade Federal de Lavras = Federal University of Lavras
2 LGI - Laboratoire Génie Industriel - EA 2606
3 REEDS - Centre international de Recherches en Economie écologique, Eco-innovation et ingénierie du Développement Soutenable

This paper presents a scientometric and bibliometric review of the research on autonomous vehicles (AVs) to identify its main characteristics, evolution, and potential trends for future studies. Relevant articles were searched on WoS, yielding a research corpus of 10,580 papers, and the software CiteSpace was subsequently used for analysis. The results showed that AV research is heterogeneous and registered a growing demand over time. Multidisciplinarity is present, with 96 science fields being identified. As in any other sector, it is necessary to understand broader aspects of this industry such as the market factors surrounding it, as well as other economic and managerial issues. In this sense, we observed a migration of the research field from multidisciplinarity to pluridisciplinarity with a greater number of studies focusing on the latter. We understand that terminology standardisation contributes to achieving pluridisciplinarity. As such, it is important to highlight that sustainability, public policies, liability, and safety, as well as business issues such as performance and business models are some of the tendencies in the field of AVs. For future studies, we suggest a more in-depth analysis of publications in terms of individual search terms, as well as the sub-areas identified as trends in this paper.

Mots clés: bibliometrics; CiteSpace; review; scientometrics; Eco-innovation; Mobilite urbaine; Autonomous vehicles

Domaines: Economies et finances; Autre

Rodrigo Marçal Gandia, Fabio Antonialli, Bruna Habib Cavazza, Arthur Miranda Neto, Danilo Alves De Lima, et al.. Autonomous vehicles: scientometric and bibliometric review. Transport Reviews, In press, 39 (1), pp.9-28. ⟨10.1080/01441647.2018.1518937⟩. ⟨hal-01877042⟩