Research development of Bitcoin: a network and concept linking analysis

Purpose: This study aims to provide researchers a holistic approach for comprehensive understanding of the Bitcoin-related research by discovering its trends, subjects, relations, keywords and concepts. Design/methodology/approach: An integrated approach of bibliometric analysis, network analysis and concept linking analysis was proposed for exploring Bitcoin-related studies from 70 countries in the Scopus database. Findings: The bibliometric analysis shows that electronic money and blockchain are the mainstream issues of Bitcoin, and the domain distribution of the literature is mainly in engineering-related fields. Through the network analysis of cocitations, co-occurrences and cowords, research clusters were discovered respectively from different perspectives. The authors also have mastered a multilevel concept linking diagram for six related major concepts. Originality/value: The major contribution of this research is about providing an integrated and comprehensive approach to extract the mainstream issues that can help researchers conduct Bitcoin-relevant research. This study shows the development trend, context and clusters of Bitcoin-related studies from various perspectives networks and produces a visual concept linking diagram that will enable researchers to quickly understand the contextual relationship between Bitcoin keywords during literature analysis. In addition, the most crucial studies in the main topics are extracted to save the considerable time and labor that would be required to manually read all the literature and summarize the issues.