Department of Computer Science, University of Lleida, 25001 Lleida, Spain.
Department of Economics, University of Lleida, 25001 Lleida, Spain.
Sensors (Basel). 2023 Mar 16;23(6):3167. doi: 10.3390/s23063167.
Bitcoin was created in 2008 as the first decentralized cryptocurrency, providing an innovative data management technology, which was later named blockchain. It ensured data validation without intervention from intermediaries. During its early stages, it was conceived as a financial technology by most researchers. It was not until 2015, when the Ethereum cryptocurrency was officially launched worldwide, along with its revolutionary technology called smart contracts, that researchers began to change their perception of the technology and look for uses outside the financial world. This paper analyzes the literature since 2016, one year after Ethereum, analyzing the evolution of interest in the technology to date. For this purpose, a total of 56,864 documents created between 2016 and 2022 from four major publishers were analyzed, providing answers to the following questions. Q1: How has interest in blockchain technology increased? Q2: What have been the major blockchain research interests? Q3: What have been the most outstanding works of the scientific community? The paper clearly exposes the evolution of blockchain technology, making it clear that, as the years go by, it is becoming a complementary technology instead of the main focus of studies. Finally, we highlight the most popular and recurrent topics discussed in the literature over the analyzed period of time.
比特币于 2008 年诞生，是首个去中心化的加密货币，它提供了一种创新的数据管理技术，后来被命名为区块链。它确保了在没有中介干预的情况下对数据进行验证。在早期阶段，大多数研究人员都将其视为金融科技。直到 2015 年，以太坊加密货币在全球正式推出，同时推出了革命性的智能合约技术，研究人员才开始改变对该技术的看法，并在金融领域之外寻找用途。本文分析了自 2016 年以来的文献，也就是以太坊推出的一年后，分析了迄今为止对该技术的兴趣演变。为此，分析了来自四个主要出版商的在 2016 年至 2022 年期间创建的总共 56864 篇文档，回答了以下问题。问题 1：区块链技术的兴趣是如何增加的？问题 2：区块链的主要研究兴趣是什么？问题 3：科学界最杰出的作品是什么？本文清楚地揭示了区块链技术的演变，表明随着时间的推移，它正在成为一种补充技术，而不是研究的主要焦点。最后，我们强调了在分析的时间段内文献中讨论的最流行和反复出现的主题。
