Business research on Industry 4.0: a systematic review using topic modelling approach

• Published in: Future business journal Vol. 10; no. 1; pp. 111 - 15
• Main Authors: Islam, Md Nazrul, Hossain, Md Mofazzal, Ornob, Md Shafayet Shahed
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01-11-2024; Springer Nature B.V; SpringerOpen
• Subjects: Automation; Bibliometric analysis; Bibliometrics; Business and Management; Data collection; Digitization; Economics; Fourth industrial revolution; Industry 4.0; Keywords; Lean manufacturing; Literature reviews; Operations management; Review; Semantics; Supply chains; Systematic literature review; Systematic review; Topic modelling; Germany; Industry 4.0; Fourth industrial revolution; Bibliometric analysis; Topic modelling; Systematic literature review
• ISSN: 2314-7210; 2314-7202; 2314-7210
• DOI: 10.1186/s43093-024-00398-2

The number of theoretical and empirical literature on Industry 4.0 research has seen tremendous growth over the past few years. We seek to identify and classify the popular research topics published on Industry 4.0 in business and economics literature using a novel approach. First, we performed a co-occurrence analysis and found Industry 4.0 to have the strongest connection with innovation, implying the indispensability of innovation for the fourth industrial revolution. Further, we employed LDA-based topic modelling to identify the most frequent terms and labelled eight different topics based on the quantitative value of each term. Finally, we reviewed the relevant literature for each topic identified through the topic modelling process. Our literature review reveals that the concentration of existing literature is model-focussed. This study provides quantitative evidence of frequent occurrences of popular terms. We conclude that future studies should focus more on empirical measurement of the benefits of transiting towards the fourth industrial revolution.