A bibliometric study of cost benefit analysis in cloud computing research

Cost–benefit analysis (CBA) plays a critical role in guiding cloud computing adoption and investment decisions, yet the research landscape surrounding this topic remains fragmented across technical and interdisciplinary domains. This study presents a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of scientific publications on cost–benefit analysis in cloud computing over the period 2010–2024. Data were retrieved from the Scopus database using a structured search strategy and analyzed using the Bibliometrix package in R and VOSviewer for performance evaluation and science mapping. A total of 970 publications were included following screening and duplicate removal. The results reveal sustained growth in scientific production, particularly after the mid-2010s, reflecting the increasing strategic importance of economic evaluation in cloud environments. Journal articles constitute the largest share of publications, although conference papers also represent a substantial proportion, indicating a technologically dynamic research domain. The United States and China emerge as the leading contributors in terms of productivity and citation impact, while several other countries demonstrate growing participation and collaboration. Source analysis shows that research is predominantly published in engineering- and technology-oriented journals, highlighting the technical orientation of cost modeling and optimization studies. Keyword co-occurrence analysis identifies core thematic clusters centered on cost modeling, optimization, resource allocation, scheduling algorithms, and performance evaluation. Emerging themes include edge computing, serverless computing, energy efficiency, security, and sustainability, suggesting that the conceptualization of costs and benefits is expanding beyond traditional financial metrics. Overall, the findings demonstrate that CBA in cloud computing has evolved into a structured and expanding research field with increasing methodological diversity and interdisciplinary relevance. The study provides a consolidated overview of its intellectual structure and identifies directions for future research, particularly in standardizing evaluation frameworks and integrating empirical validation into economic modeling approaches. This study shows how research on cost–benefit analysis in cloud computing has grown steadily over the past 15 years, especially as more organizations moved their systems to the cloud. The United States and China lead in research output, but many other countries are becoming more active, showing that cloud cost evaluation is a global research topic. New research is not only about saving money anymore; it now also looks at energy use, security, and new cloud models like edge and serverless computing.