Introduction: Over the past three decades, significant changes have taken place in the world economy, which are reflected in the technical and socio-economic sciences. At the same time, the analysis of publications reflected in EconLit and other authoritative electronic resources, including the journal Scientometrics, showed the absence of review, and especially scientometric works, in which an attempt was made to determine the trends in engineering and economic research based on EconLit, taking into account significant innovative areas (Industry 5.0, etc.). The purpose of the study is to identify new aspects of engineering and economic research using multivariate scientometric analysis based on EconLit materials with the addition of data from other authoritative sources (Scopus, etc.).
Methods: The main method is multivariate scientometric analysis. In cases where paper or electronic media and forms of communication accepted in the scientific community are used to obtain data and communicate to others, scientometrics can be interpreted as bibliometrics, and, accordingly, the phrase ‘bibliometric analysis’ can be used. The definition ‘multidimensional’ is used to emphasize the consistent and interconnected application of bibliographic databases, methods for their processing, models and software tools for their analysis, with a focus on the N-dimensional spiral model.
Results and Discussion: The main novelty includes the ‘points of growth’ and the trends in engineering and economic research in 1991—2020. We illustrated the most interesting trends by examples of publications. The analysis of publications in Scopus concerning the concept of Industry 5.0, carried out using the VOSviewer program, made it possible to identify significant terms and their combinations, calculate publication activity indicators based on the EconLit data, and clarify the ‘growth points’ of engineering and economic research.
Conclusion: Over the past 30 years, there has been a rapid involvement in the engineering economy of new JEL subject microcategories, an increase in the number of intersections between microcategories, and a noticeable enrichment of terminology. This trend poses new challenges for the terminological and lexical types of bibliometric analysis. On the one hand, the use of programs such as VOSviewer helps in this area. On the other hand, this requires a deeper meaningful analysis, highlighting the levels of the real and the virtual and their mutual penetration.
