Radio

frequency identification (RFID) is one of the most influential

technologies of the twenty-first century. Today, RFID technology is

being applied in a wide array of disciplines in science research and

industrial projects. The significant impact of RFID is clearly visible

by the rate of academic publications in the last few years. This article

surveys the literature to evaluate the trend of RFID technology

development based on academic publications from 2001 to 2014. Both

bibliometric and content analyses are applied to examine this topic in

SCI-Index and SSCI-Index documents. Based on the bibliometric technique,

all 5159 existing RFID documents are investigated and several important

factors are reviewed, including contributions by country,

organizations, funding agencies, journal title, authors, research area

and Web of Science category. Moreover, content analysis is applied to

the top 100 most cited documents and based on their contents, these top

100 documents are classified into four different categories with each

category divided in several sub-categories. This research aims to

identify the best source of the most cited RFID papers and to provide a

comprehensive road map for the future research and development in the

field of RFID technology in both academic and industrial settings. Six

key findings from this review are (1) the experimental method is the

most popular research methodology, (2) RFID research has been a hot area

of investigation but will branch out into related subset areas, (3)

South East Asia is positioned to dominate this research space, (4) the

focus of research up to now has been on technical issues rather than

business and management issues, (5) research on RFID application domains

will spread beyond supply chain and health care to a number of

different areas, and (6) more research will be related to policy issues

such as security and privacy.