Progress and Trends of Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing: A Bibliometric and Visualization Analysis

Abstract Recent trends and advancements in the field of artificial intelligence have initiated their extensive integration across diverse industrial domains. Despite its nascent stage of development, several studies reveal that artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to play an important role in the development of modern and innovative manufacturing at a substantial scale. This study presents a visually enriched bibliometric analysis of the global status and trends of artificial intelligence in the prominent manufacturing sector using VOS, Python and R Studio software. Specifically, it undertakes a thorough examination of the existing scholarly literature on AI in manufacturing sourced from the Scopus database, encompassing the period from 2013 to 2022. Over the last decade, there has been a substantial rising trend in AI in manufacturing research. The accumulation of papers in this topic has closely followed a polynomial growth model and predicted the publications on AI in manufacturing-related topics to be over 5000 per year. China has emerged as the top contributor to worldwide research efforts in AI in manufacturing, followed by the USA, India, Germany, and the United Kingdom. However, the journals “Procedia CIRP”, International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, and IEEE Access from the Netherlands, United Kingdom, and USA, respectively, have the most publications per year in this field. Western Reserve University, Clevland, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, followed by University of Central Florida, Orlando, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, School of Mechanical Engineering are the most productive institutes in terms of contributions to this topic.