Fusion of Blockchain and Industry 4.0: A Bibliometric Analysis and Detailed Review

Industry 4.0—often associated with intelligent manufacturing—is a paradigm shift propelled by cutting-edge technologies like blockchain, IoT, and artificial intelligence. Companies worldwide are moving towards such well-known technologies for their benefits in distributed decision-making processes, smart contracts, and cloud-based production systems. These features are significant in implementing Industry 4.0 (I4.0). This technology equips today’s devices with those tools that swiftly support Industry 4.0. This contemporary study conducts an extensive survey and bibliometric analysis on the fusion of Blockchain (BC) with I4.0. The objective is to investigate the significant elements of BC that are common to Industry 4.0 through the commonality of keywords used in previous literature. The prerequisite to the type of literature extracted from the Scopus database is using two keywords, “Industry 4.0” and “Blockchain,” in every paper. The performance metrics extracted in this analysis are country-wise contribution, top journals, most cited papers, and most common keywords. The last section of the paper discusses the summary of top influential papers through the top enablers of blockchain that drive I4.0.