Trends, Gaps, and Research Trajectories in Quantum Computing: A Comprehensive Systematic and Bibliometric Review
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11594/Keywords:
research landscape, trends, gaps, trajectories, quantum computing, systematic bibliometric reviewAbstract
This paper presents a comprehensive systematic and bibliometric review of the rapidly expanding literature on quantum computing. The study addresses six research questions concerning prominent themes, temporal evolution, types of key findings, frequently reported research gaps, higher-order gap typologies, and future research directions. Utilizing a researcher-curated database, the final corpus comprises 153 studies compiled from non-Scopus, Scopus and Web of Science. The results demonstrate that quantum hardware and architecture, algorithms, and theoretical foundations dominate the current literature. Furthermore, publication output has risen significantly between 2018 and 2025. Among the reported findings, algorithmic innovations, performance claims, and hardware advancements are the most common. Despite this progress, the field faces substantial barriers; technical, scalability, fault-tolerance, and methodological-standardization gaps are the most frequently reported. Based on these identified gaps, eight actionable future research directions emerge to guide the scientific community. Ultimately, this review concludes that quantum computing is actively transitioning from a purely physics-driven domain into a multidisciplinary, engineering- and application-oriented science. However, its continued advancement is presently constrained by a hardware-methodology-application triad, wherein reporting practices often outpace empirical verification and standardized benchmarking.
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