A Bibliometric Analysis of Distributed Control Publications

Abstract

As an emerging research direction in the field of systems and control, distributed control or decentralized control has attracted great interests of researchers in the past decade. In this paper, a bibliometric analysis of the relevant publications is presented based on the data collected from the Science Citation Index Expanded Web of Science. In particular, we make a discussion on the trend of total publications, journal distribution, top research organizations (i.e. universities and institutes), and publication performance of nations, and the focus is on highly cited articles and authors, subject categories, and the future trend of hot topics. Some key bibliometric indexes such as single country articles, first author articles, and internationally collaborative articles are employed to give us a detailed picture about the intrinsic relationship and the state of the art of distributed control publications. Finally, the statistical analysis indicates that multi-agent systems are extremely popular in recent years and will dominate the future research on distributed control.