  Periodically researchers examine their fields of research in order to test
the fields maturity, to determine theories and methods used, and to uncover
areas of research emphasis. Research articles for these studies are generally
located through keyword search, then manually read and coded in order to
summarise the research field. This research tests using metadata analysis
alone, on the internet of things (IoT) research field, using data extracted
from three academic databases. The metadata analysis was proposed to reduce
time in analysis, and allow for testing of a much larger sample of articles.
Findings indicated that the IoT research field was immature, with experimental
methods dominating research outputs. However, difficulties with keyword
metadata included synonyms, abbreviations, lack of accuracy, and method and
theory not being included in metadata. A keyword schema is suggested in order
to relieve these problems in future articles, and to assist researchers in
locating relevant literature.
