“The fourth industrial revolution” in the system of subject categories

he work by W. Rostow in 1985 was the first study on the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Analysis of publication activity based on data from the Scopus citation system and the Russian Scientific Electronic Library (elibrary.ru) for 2011‒2020 shows researchers are significantly more interested in this topic. A study of abstracts and available full texts of publications shows that analysis of the distribution of this topic by branches of knowledge is the least developed field. Therefore, the goal of the article is to quantify the degree of penetration of the Fourth Industrial Revolution topic in the Scopus publications at the macro and micro levels of the ASJC classification. This goal includes four interrelated research tasks. The first task is to evaluate publications for 27 macro categories and their possible relationships. As a result, we obtained two 27×27 tables that show the absolute and relative distribution of publications by 27 macro categories and their paired relationships. The second task is an assessment for 15 micro categories included in the macro category “Business, Management and Accounting” and “Economics, Econometrics and Finance”. A 15×15 table with absolute and relative indices shows the distribution of publications in the selected 15 micro categories and their intersections. The third task is to evaluate publications for 334 ASJC micro categories without taking the intersections between micro categories into account. This resulted in identification of 94 micro categories that are out of the Fourth Industrial Revolution framework, and ranking of the remaining 210 categories according to the number of publications and the coefficients of penetration in the subject micro categories. The fourth task was to develop a method for finding papers at the intersections of various micro categories. The text presents 24 articles on management and other related micro categories that illustrate the created method. Discussion and directions for possible future research complete the article. The database includes 9810 publications indexed by Scopus, which in their titles, abstracts and keywords contained the phrases “fourth industrial revolution”, “4th industrial revolution” or “industry 4.0”. The author of the article personally did all the data extraction from Scopus and its processing from March 30 to April 3, 2020.