Research Landscape of Industry 5.0: A Bibliometric Analysis and Thematic Synthesis

This paper presents a literature review and bibliometric synthesis of research on Industry 5.0 based exclusively on publications indexed in the Scopus database that include “Industry 5.0” among the authors’ keywords. Restricting the literature corpus to authors’ keywords was considered an appropriate approach for reconstructing the Industry 5.0 framework because keywords function as “academic hashtags,” reflecting how researchers intentionally position and describe their work within a specific research domain. The analysis covers the period 2013–2025. Unlike previous bibliometric studies that relied on full-text, title, or abstract searches, the approach adopted in this study treats authors’ keywords as an explicit declaration of a publication’s alignment with Industry 5.0 research. This perspective enables the reconstruction of the evolution, thematic structure, and cognitive boundaries of the field from the researchers’ own viewpoint. It also facilitates an examination of how Industry 5.0 has emerged and evolved as a distinct area of scientific inquiry between 2013 and 2025. The novelty of the study lies not in the application of bibliometric methods per se, but in the adoption of authors’ keywords as a criterion for delimiting the literature corpus. This methodological perspective allows for the development of an Industry 5.0 research landscape. In addition, the study provides a comprehensive overview of existing bibliometric analyses of Industry 5.0 and compiles relevant electronic sources to facilitate rapid access to the field’s principal research streams.