Identifying Influential Trends in the Cloud Computing Pricing Research Using Computational Literature Review and Social Network Analysis Centrality Measures

Cloud computing has become one of the newest and most popular topics in the field of the Internet. Pricing is one of the main factors that can affect the successful implementation of cloud computing. Due to the large volume of research conducted in this field, the purpose of this study is to review the cloud computing pricing literature using a Computational Literature Review (CLR) and identify influential trends in this field. For this purpose, the publication and citation trends are first identified. The most influential authors, journals, and articles are then determined using citation analysis. Next, the structure of the co-occurrence network of keywords is analyzed using three centrality measures degree, betweenness, and closeness. Finally, the thematic trends are identified using a positional analysis based on centrality measures. According to the obtained results, research in this field has grown significantly. Keywords such as edge, computer architecture, and distributed computing have recently come to the fore. Also, words such as model, energy, allocation, strategy, auction, design, and reliability have been among the most influential in this field. The positional analysis indicates that the researchers are trying to overcome resource scarcity through three lines of work: resource provision, resource allocation, and resource distribution. Trends show that the cloud industry is highly attractive and will also have high growth. In the future, we will also see an increase in the use of value-based pricing methods in cloud computing and research in this area.