Growth, Citation Impact, and Intellectual Foundations of Digital Twin in Transportation and Logistics Research: A Bibliometric Review

Abstract Book of the 10th International Conference on Research in Management

Year: 2026

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Growth, Citation Impact, and Intellectual Foundations of Digital Twin in Transportation and Logistics Research: A Bibliometric Review

Nuriman Abd Malik, Farha Ghapar, Suhaily Mohd-Ramly, Ahmad Fauzi Ahmad Zaini

ABSTRACT:

Digital Twin has arisen as a transformative technology in transportation and logistics, enabling organizations to enhance operational efficiency, monitoring, simulation, and real-time decision-making through digital representations of physical assets and processes. Despite its growing adoption, partial consideration has been assumed to understanding the intellectual growth, citation influence, and knowledge foundations of the field. This research addresses this gap through a bibliometric review of Digital Twin research in transportation and logistics.
A total of 882 publications indexed in the Scopus database between 2020 and 2026 were analyzed using BiblioSpy®. The analysis examined publication growth, Relative Citation Impact (RCI), research life cycle, journal quartile distribution, and highly cited publications to evaluate the evolution and influence of the field.
The findings reveal that publication growth reflects increasing academic and industry interest in Digital Twin applications. However, the declining RCI suggests that publication output has expanded faster than the development of highly influential scholarly contributions. The growing presence of publications in high-quartile journals indicates increasing academic recognition, while life-cycle analysis shows that the field is progressing towards a more mature stage of development. Highly cited studies focus on supply chain visibility, intelligent transportation systems, infrastructure management, real-time decision-making, and the integration of Digital Twin with evolving technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and blockchain. Overall, this study clarifies the growth trajectory, citation influence, and intellectual foundations of Digital Twin research, while identifying future directions for academic and industry development.

Keywords: Digital Twin, Transportation, Logistics, Bibliometric Analysis