Research themes and trends in the field of blockchain engineering: a topic modelling analysis

Abstract

This study employed topic modeling to identify key research themes in blockchain engineering and examined how these themes have evolved over time. The dataset of collected abstracts from 3,665 relevant papers of Web of Science (WoS) core collection for the period from 2019 to 2024 was analyzed with latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) approach. Based on the results of the topic development trends analysis, the topics collectively highlight the evolving landscape of technologies such as blockchain, smart contracts, the internet of things (IoT), and edge computing, focusing on their integration and impact across sectors like finance, healthcare, supply chain management, and energy systems. It offers valuable insights and implications for research related to blockchain engineering. Latent semantic indexing (LSI) provided further understanding by highlighting strong connections between specific topics, such as energy trading, supply chains, and medical applications. A comparison of LDA and LSI topics revealed overlapping themes, which supports the reliability of the topic structure identified by LDA.