Research trends on smart urban governance in Asia: a bibliometric analysis

Purpose Smart urban governance research has progressed over the past few decades following changes and increasingly complicated city management difficulties. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to use a scoping review and bibliometric analysis to examine all the publications on smart urban governance, especially in Asia. Design/methodology/approach A total of 1,900 smart urban governance articles indexed in the Scopus database was analyzed through scoping review and bibliometric analysis. The articles were analyzed by the number of publications per year, contributing countries, subject areas, authors, cited documents, related issues and cited papers. Furthermore, VOSviewer was used to provide a visual analysis of the co-occurrence of keywords. Findings This study indicated that urban smart governance publications continue to increase yearly. Even though the area of analysis is Asia, the USA and China seriously contributed to the analysis. Therefore, the topic of smart urban governance has become a discussion for scholars in the international. From the Scopus database analysis, the top three subject areas are social sciences (28%), environmental science (20%) and medicine (16%). The synthesis using bibliometric analysis by VOSviewer obtained 13 clusters. Research limitations/implications This study only focuses on the Scopus database and one specific topic, using one bibliometric analysis tool. Meanwhile, national and international index databases are not used. Originality/value This paper examined publication trends on smart urban governance. This paper provided a comprehensive analysis of topic-specific knowledge areas based on previous studies. Additionally, this paper suggested the direction of the development of smart urban governance in the future.