Digital Twin Technology — A bibliometric study of top research articles based on Local Citation Score

The Digital Twin (DT) is defined as a digital representation of a physical entity in a virtual space. It has a wide range of research and applications in smart manufacturing. The development of DT can be reflected in scientific research, especially the most cited studies in the DT area. In this paper, 3763 articles on DT technology were obtained from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) using keyword searches. These scientific papers were analysed by HistCite and “Local Citation Analysis” to obtain the 100 most cited DT studies in smart manufacturing. After that, the 100 studies were summarised and discussed by year of publication, conferences, journals, countries, institutions, technologies and applications. This paper allows scholars to grasp the direction and critical areas of DT development from important DT studies in smart manufacturing.