The Landscape of Academic Literature in Quantum Technologies

TL;DR

This paper uses bibliometric analysis to map the structure, key topics, influential publications, and main contributors in the field of quantum technologies, revealing its roots in physics and its core research areas.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive bibliometric mapping of quantum technologies literature, identifying key clusters, core publications, and influential countries and organizations.

Findings

Quantum communication, quantum computation, and physical realizations are the main literature clusters.

Identified a core set of 34 highly cited publications in the field.

Mapped key contributors and central nodes at country and organization levels.

Abstract

In this study, we investigated the academic literature on quantum technologies (QT) using bibliometric tools. We used a set of 49,823 articles obtained from the Web of Science (WoS) database using a search query constructed through expert opinion. Analysis of this revealed that QT is deeply rooted in physics, and the majority of the articles are published in physics journals. Keyword analysis revealed that the literature could be clustered into three distinct sets, which are (i) quantum communication/cryptography, (ii) quantum computation, and (iii) physical realizations of quantum systems. We performed a burst analysis that showed the emergence and fading away of certain key concepts in the literature. This is followed by co-citation analysis on the highly cited articles provided by the WoS, using these we devised a set of core corpus of 34 publications. Comparing the most highly cited articles in this set with respect to the initial set we found that there is a clear difference in most cited subjects. Finally, we performed co-citation analyses on country and organization levels to find the central nodes in the literature. Overall, the analyses of the datasets allowed us to cluster the literature into three distinct sets, construct the core corpus of the academic literature in QT, and to identify the key players on country and organization levels, thus offering insight into the current state of the field. Search queries and access to figures are provided in the appendix.