Maturity of the Internet of Things Research Field: Or Why Choose Rigorous Keywords

Abstract: Periodically researchers examine their fields of research in order to test the fields maturity, to determine theories and methods used, and to uncover areas of research emphasis. Research articles for these studies are generally located through keyword search, then manually read and coded in order to summarise the research field. This research tests using metadata analysis alone, on the internet of things (IoT) research field, using data extracted from three academic databases. The metadata analysis was proposed to reduce time in analysis, and allow for testing of a much larger sample of articles. Findings indicated that the IoT research field was immature, with experimental methods dominating research outputs. However, difficulties with keyword metadata included synonyms, abbreviations, lack of accuracy, and method and theory not being included in metadata. A keyword schema is suggested in order to relieve these problems in future articles, and to assist researchers in locating relevant literature.