More than ten years of Blockchain creation: How did we use the technology and which direction is the research heading?

To identify how blockchain technology affects current and future research, we carried out a bibliometric overview of the journal articles written on the blockchain. We aimed to answer some of the questions to visualize the trend of the publications regarding the advancement of blockchain utilization in fields relating to finance, economics, and social science. We used the Scopus database for the literature research, which resulted in 506 papers by 1278 authors from 79 countries. Our study showed that from 2008 till 2021, publishing about blockchain was more significant in conference papers than articles by a factor of 2. Our study also showed the importance of citation regarding published academic articles, the link to the number of publications, the authors, the universities, the affiliated organizations, and the countries of the publications. The use of authoring and citation analysis give valuable insights. On the topic of blockchain, we identified Financial Innovation as the most impactful journal on the topic, the National Natural Science Foundation of China as the leading funding sponsor on blockchain research, the USA as the highest publication production country, and Hong Kong as the highest country in the average citation per document produced. We finally identified the 20 most cited articles on the blockchain topics. Unlike other brief bibliometric studies, our study's investigation and findings could become a first stage of learning for those interested in carrying out a bibliometric study. In addition, our study could become the starting point for any future research on any blockchain projects.