Unmanned aerial vehicles research in Scopus: an analysis and visualization of publication activity and research collaboration at the country level.

This article proposes a global bibliometric overview of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAVs) publications in the Scopus database during 1985–2015 at the country level. The article is structured as follows. The first section provides an introduction and overview of papers on the publication and patent activity in field of UAVs. Section two describes the methodological framework of the study. Section three provides an overview of co-publication activity in UAV research. Section four is devoted to an analysis of patterns of international collaboration in field of UAV research in Scopus. Finally, section five concludes the paper by summarizing the key findings from the analysis and illustrating the implications from the analysis and offering proposals for possible further developments in the field. This study uses a wide set of bibliometric indicators and network metrics for measuring different aspects of publication activity and citation levels as well as cross-country research collaboration on UAVs. In order to illustrate country-to-country research collaboration maps NodeXL software was applied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]