A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW AS A TOOL TO ANALYSE EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES – THE METHODOLOGY AND BLOCKCHAIN CASE STUDY

Universities should educate students adequately to current market needs. Universities curriculum should be well ahead of these needs. It is very hard due to the long cycle of education in higher education, as well as the very long duration of teaching programs development. It is especially a very difficult task in some fast-growing areas. Some fields of information technology, genetic engineering or biotechnology belong to such areas. It is very difficult for universities to be up to date in offered study program.

This paper presents the methodology of the emerging technologies analysis. The purpose of it is to find and justify the creating of new content of the curricula in higher education. The knowledge discovered during this analysis allows to modify in advance the content of courses or create new one, as well as to prepare the staff and technical base for their implementation in higher education.

A systematic literature review, with some modifications, is used as a tool in the paper. Presented methodology consists of the following steps: searching for articles in scientific databases using keywords from a given area, rejection of non-fit articles, refine the subject matter and determine the statistics of the occurrences of the topics. The dynamics of the growth number of articles on a given topic indicates their rapid development.The main bibliographic databases, such as Web of Science Core Collection, BIOSIS Citation Index, Current Contents Connect, Data Citation Index, Derwent Innovations Index, KCI-Korean Journal Database, MEDLINE, Russian Science Citation Index, are used in the methodology.

The final part of the paper presents a case study on the rapidly growing information technology area. This area is the using of blockchain technology in the information security and data protection fields. Research using the presented methodology has shown a sharp increase in the number of scientific articles in 2017 and 2018 on the use of blockchain in information security. For example, there were only 89 publications in year 2016 and 343 in 2017. A systematic literature review has made possible to prove the emerging of this field of technology and to indicate areas which should be included in the study program.