Digital Twin Applications in Smart Cities: Mapping Global Research Trends and Emerging Frontiers

This study is anchored in the quest to systematically chart the academic territory of digital twin technology applications in smart city development. It aims to elucidate the extent and focus of scholarly discourse, pinpointing key thematic developments and assessing their evolution over time. This study conducts a bibliometric analysis using literature focusing on the period 2018–2024 of research on digital twins and smart cities. The most frequently used Scopus database was used to extract bibliometric data. 422 ar-ticles were considered for analysis. This study utilizes co-authorship, co-occurrence, citation analysis, and bibliographic coupling of author keywords while graphically mapping the bibliographic material using BiblioMagika software. This study identified the authors, institutions and countries that publish the most globally on the topic of Digital Twins and Smart Cities. The results revealed that most of the published articles come from China. The other highly ranked countries by origins of studies on Digital Twins and Smart Cities were found to be the USA and Italy all of which are developed nations or economies. The study makes significant and emergent contributions by building on the research area as well as providing a reference point for the interpretation of findings, as well as directions for future research.