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Research development of Bitcoin: a network and concept linking analysis

Chien-wen Shen (Department of Business Administration, National Central University, Taoyuan, Taiwan) (SocialTech Research Group, Faculty of Business Administration, Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam)
Li-chin Chang (Department of Business Administration, National Central University, Taoyuan, Taiwan) (Department of Fashion Industry Management, Hsing Wu University, New Taipei City, Taiwan)
Tzu-chuan Su (Department of Business Administration, National Central University, Taoyuan, Taiwan)

Library Hi Tech

ISSN: 0737-8831

Article publication date: 25 June 2020

Issue publication date: 21 June 2021

512

Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to provide researchers a holistic approach for comprehensive understanding of the Bitcoin-related research by discovering its trends, subjects, relations, keywords and concepts.

Design/methodology/approach

An integrated approach of bibliometric analysis, network analysis and concept linking analysis was proposed for exploring Bitcoin-related studies from 70 countries in the Scopus database.

Findings

The bibliometric analysis shows that electronic money and blockchain are the mainstream issues of Bitcoin, and the domain distribution of the literature is mainly in engineering-related fields. Through the network analysis of cocitations, co-occurrences and cowords, research clusters were discovered respectively from different perspectives. The authors also have mastered a multilevel concept linking diagram for six related major concepts.

Originality/value

The major contribution of this research is about providing an integrated and comprehensive approach to extract the mainstream issues that can help researchers conduct Bitcoin-relevant research. This study shows the development trend, context and clusters of Bitcoin-related studies from various perspectives networks and produces a visual concept linking diagram that will enable researchers to quickly understand the contextual relationship between Bitcoin keywords during literature analysis. In addition, the most crucial studies in the main topics are extracted to save the considerable time and labor that would be required to manually read all the literature and summarize the issues.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, under contract #MOST 107-2410-H-008 -042.

Citation

Shen, C.-w., Chang, L.-c. and Su, T.-c. (2021), "Research development of Bitcoin: a network and concept linking analysis", Library Hi Tech, Vol. 39 No. 2, pp. 488-505. https://doi.org/10.1108/LHT-10-2019-0210

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited

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