Decoding the research landscape of blockchain technology: Scientific performance, knowledge structures, cross-domain applications, and future research directions

As the world moves towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by the end of 2030, it faces numerous challenges, including transparency, traceability, accountability, and efficient resource management. At this moment, blockchain has come into the limelight as a means to address these challenges, resulting in a significant surge in research. So current research aims to uncover the trends in BT and provide future insights. The authors performed a bibliometric analysis covering literature from 2017 to 2026. After careful filtering, metadata for 88271 documents (covering 79.1% out of 111564 documents) were extracted from the Scopus database and analysed using RStudio, VOSviewer, and Excel. The results showed a significant rise in blockchain research and a continuous decline in citations due to the cumulative nature of citations. Moreover, this study finds that both journal articles and conference papers dominate, accounting for 83.6% of the literature, while journal reviews, books, and conference reviews account for 16.4%. Current research also indicates that blockchain-based research has shifted from a technological perspective towards an intelligent, integrated, and user-centric ecosystem. Based on this research, future studies should focus more on theoretical and conceptual work in the blockchain field, given its significant attention from researchers. Additionally, future researchers should examine how blockchain's decentralised and secure structure, together with AI, IoT, and smart contracts, can support real-time information management and decision-making in health care, supply chains, energy, and smart cities.