A scientometric review of hotspots and emerging trends in additive manufacturing

Purpose Additive manufacturing has achieved rapid development in recent years. The purpose of this paper is to visualize the intellectual landscapes of additive manufacturing and identify the hotspots and emerging trends of additive manufacturing, which can provide references for scholars, enterprises and governments to promote the development of theory and practice in the additive manufacturing field. Design/methodology/approach Science mapping is a fast-growing interdisciplinary field originated in information science and technology. Based on this methodology, guided by a computational approach, the paper visualizes the co-occurring keywords network and co-citation references network by CiteSpaceIII software to explore the hotspots and emerging trends of additive manufacturing by the following five indicators: highly cited keywords, burst keywords, clusters, landmark references and burst references. Findings “Additive manufacturing,” “3D printing,” “3D powder printing,” “consolidation phenomena,” “microstructure,” “rapid prototyping,” etc., are the main hotspots of additive manufacturing. The trends of additive manufacturing generally consist of three stages: the fundamental concepts stage from 1995 to 2000 (“rapid prototyping,” “additive manufacturing,” etc.), the approaches and techniques applications stage from 2001 to 2010 (“stereolithography,” “scaffold,” etc.), and the emerging trends stage from 2011 to the present (“stem cell”, “selective laser,” “ti-6al-4v,” etc.). The research is most abundant in 2010 and 2012. The medical field is an important hotspot of additive manufacturing. Additive manufacturing has been researched in interdiscipline. Originality/value The paper maps the perspective of additive manufacturing and explore the hotspots and emerging trends of additive manufacturing.