Extended reality in the automotive sector: A bibliometric analysis of publications from 2012 to 2022

The present study aims to present a bibliometric analysis of publications related to "Extended Reality" (XR) in the automotive sector. XR is revolutionizing the industry in all fields, and the automotive is one of the sectors that has had much to gain from this technology and its components (Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality). Articles on XR in the automotive field that were published from 2012 to 2022 were retrieved from the Scopus database. Extracted items were analysed in terms of the document type, document language, year of publication, country, authors, affiliations, sources, citations, keywords, and research domains. The open-source tool VOSviewer was used to visualize trends in research on XR applied to automotive. The analyses of 1584 documents revealed that the total number of publications has continually increased over the last 11 years. The country producing most of the articles in this field was Germany, followed by the United States and China. The most productive journal is Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour and the institution that issued most of the articles is Technical University of Munich. From the analysis of author keywords, the prominent research areas currently involving the use of XR technologies in automotive can be highlighted: virtual prototyping, design, manufacturing, sales, training, driver or pedestrian behaviour analysis, and ergonomics. More recently, terms like artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles have started to be used more frequently in studies in the field. The current study reveals an expanding corpus of literature on XR-based applications for the automotive sector using bibliometric methods. Researchers and stakeholders can use this study as a useful reference to comprehend the big picture and the state-of-the-art in this area.