Knowledge Diffusion of the Internet of Things (IoT): A Main Path Analysis

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept that has attracted significant attention since the emergence of wireless technology. The knowledge diffusion of IoT takes place when an individual disseminates his knowledge of IoT to the persons to whom he is directly connected, and knowledge creation arises when the persons receive new knowledge of IoT, which is combined with their existing knowledge. In the current literature, several efforts have been devoted to summarising previous studies on IoT. However, the rapid development of IoT research necessitates examining the knowledge diffusion routes in the IoT domain by applying the main path analysis (MPA). It is crucial to update prior IoT studies and revisit the knowledge evolution and future research directions in this domain. Therefore, this paper adopts the keyword co-occurrence network and MPA to identify the research hotspots and study the historical development of the IoT domain based on 27,425 papers collected from the Web of Science from 1970 to 2020. The results show that IoT research is focused on IoT applications for smart cities, wireless networks, blockchain technology, computing technologies, and AI technologies. The findings from the MPA address the need to explore the knowledge evolution in the IoT domain. They also provide a valuable guide to disseminate the knowledge of IoT among researchers and practitioners, assisting them to understand the history, present and future trends of IoT development and implementation.