A contemplative overview of smart communities: a hybrid analytical approach

<jats:sec><jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Purpose</jats:title><jats:p>This study aims to uncover and develop explicit knowledge of existing smart communities (SCs) to guide services and business solutions for enterprises and serve community users in a well-thought-out manner. These sagacious frameworks will assist in analyzing trends and reaching out to pre-existing setups with different degrees of expertise.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Design/methodology/approach</jats:title><jats:p>A systematic overview is provided in this paper to unify insights and competencies toward building SCs; a hybrid analytical approach is used consisting of machine learning and bibliometric analysis. Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) are the primary databases for this purpose.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Findings</jats:title><jats:p>SCs implement cutting-edge technologies to enhance mobility, elevating information and communication technology (ICT) skills and data awareness while improving business processes and efficiency. This system of SC is an evolution of the conventional method. It provides a foundation for intelligent community services based on individual users and technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, cloud computing and big data. Manufacturing-based, service-based, retail-based, resource management and infrastructure-based SCs exist in the literature.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Originality/value</jats:title><jats:p>The paper summarizes a conceptual framework of SCs based on existing works around SCs. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first systematic literature review that uses a hybrid approach of topic modeling and bibliometric analysis to understand SCs better.</jats:p></jats:sec>