SCILIC and SCAWL: Developing a smart cities corpus and academic word list

The rapid growth of smart city initiatives over the past two decades has led to a surge in research and practical applications. However, it has also resulted in significant terminological fragmentation across academic discourse, educational practices, and urban policy frameworks, posing challenges to achieving the educational and urban development targets outlined in the United Nations’ SDG 4: Quality Education and SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities. To address this gap, the present study aims to develop and validate the Smart CIties LIterature Corpus (SCILIC) and to generate a word list from it through systematic corpus linguistic analysis. The corpus comprises 3.6 million tokens sourced from two primary domains: peer-reviewed articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science (2015–2025) and technical reports from the UN-Habitat digital repository (2010–2025). Utilizing #LancsBox and complementary analytical tools, the study compiled a balanced and representative corpus and generated the Smart Cities Academic Word List (SCAWL), comprising 550-word families and 667 individual words. Quantitative analysis indicates that SCAWL accounts for 7.8% of the total corpus tokens. The findings underline the multidisciplinary nature of smart city vocabulary and highlight the importance of integrating both academic and policy-oriented sources. By supporting the development of targeted educational resources and promoting clearer conceptual understanding, this research contributes directly to the advancement of SDG 4 and SDG 11, fostering both educational quality and sustainable urban development.