An Integrated Methodology for Bibliometric Analysis: A Case Study of Internet of Things in Healthcare Applications

This paper presents an integrated and easy methodology for bibliometric analysis. The proposed methodology is evaluated on recent research activities to highlight the role of the Internet of Things in healthcare applications. Different tools are used for bibliometric studies to explore the breadth and depth of different research areas. However, these Methods consider only the Web of Science or Scopus data for bibliometric analysis. Furthermore, bibliometric analysis has not been fully utilised to examine the capabilities of the Internet of Things for medical devices and their applications. There is a need for an easy methodology to use for a single integrated analysis of data from many sources rather than just the Web of Science or Scopus. A few bibliometric studies merge the Web of Science and Scopus to conduct a single integrated piece of research. This paper presents a methodology that could be used for a single bibliometric analysis across multiple databases. Three freely available tools, Excel, Perish or Publish and the R package Bibliometrix, are used for the purpose. The proposed bibliometric methodology is evaluated for studies related to the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and its applications in healthcare settings. An inclusion/exclusion criterion is developed to explore relevant studies from the seven largest databases, including Scopus, Web of Science, IEEE, ACM digital library, PubMed, Science Direct and Google Scholar. The study focuses on factors such as the number of publications, citations per paper, collaborative research output, h-Index, primary research and healthcare application areas. Data for this study are collected from the seven largest academic databases for 2012 to 2022 related to IoMT and their applications in healthcare. The bibliometric data analysis generated different research themes within IoMT technologies and their applications in healthcare research. The study has also identified significant research areas in this field. The leading research countries and their contributions are another output from the data analysis. Finally, future research directions are proposed for researchers to explore this area in further detail.