Multidimensional Development and π-Type Trend of the Blockchain Research: A Collaborative Network Analysis

With the rapid growth of Internet technology, the blockchain has been developed fast in recent years with the wide expansions in finance, medicine, public welfare, and other fields. At the same time, the blockchain technology has also attracted researchers’ increasing attention, leading to a large number of scientific outputs that made significant contributions to blockchain research. However, few attempts can be found to investigate the development of blockchain based on the literature in this area. Therefore, this paper focuses on blockchain research by introducing bibliometric methods and comprehensively analyzes its status quo, emerging trends, and development path. Based on the above research, this paper draws two main conclusions. First, we made a comprehensive investigation of blockchain research in the past five years and then found that the main research directions in this area are Bitcoin, digital currency, and Fintech. Second, the development of blockchain research generally presents a trend of π-transformation based on the main path analysis. The above studies provide a brief view for beginners who want to learn blockchain research in a direct way and contribute to extend the theoretical foundation of blockchain research by giving a comprehensive bibliometric analysis.