English abstract
Since the advent of the Internet and the communications revolution, information has radically changed making a big leap in the world of the Internet. The trend has changed from the Internet to the Internet of things 'IOT", which facilitates the process of communication and transferring data. This study illustrates the concept of the IOT and studies the nature of its impact on academic libraries. Moreover, it analyzes the amount of intellectual output on this subject in Scopus database from 2010 to 2018. The results showed that 47,302 studies exist in Scopus and most of these studies were in 2018 due to the fact that the term was not been defined over the years as a fairly new term. In addition, the Republic of China, in general, and Beijing Post and Telecommunications University, in particular, are the most organisations interested in publishing in this field. This is because China is one of the bigest industrialized countries and the IOT is one of these industries. The results also showed that conference papers are the most common type of information source published in the IOT followed by journal articles. The most common publications were in computer sciences.
The intellectual output of Sultan Qaboos University on the IOT has reached 36 studies and the work of the conference papers were the most popular. This may be due to the lack of strict criteria when publishing conference papers in contrast to scientific journals (varying from journal to journal). The term IOT was mentioned in 12 thematic disciplines, mostly mentioned in computer science and less in social sciences. The reason is that there is a large number of studies that may have been published in Arabic but are not included in SCOPUS.
