A Systematic Literature Review of Bitemporal Databases: Research Trends, Challenges, and Future Directions 234
Gokul Neelamegam Jagdev Bhogal Parnia Samimi Omer Ozturkoglu
AbstractTraditional databases support data in one dimension only and, consequently, can’t keep a complete history of changes made to the state of the data over time. In contrast, the bitemporal database automatically handles both dimensions such as transaction time and valid time simultaneously. This advanced approach offers greater integrity and traceability of data. This is important in decision-making, for instance, in areas such as fraud detection, compliance with law, digital forensics, and regulation compliance. This research assesses articles obtainable from IEEE, Scopus, ProQuest, PubMed, and Web of Science up to 2025 with a systematic literature review methodology. Through the PRISMA framework, 74 primary studies were acquired from 102 relevant articles, providing a comprehensive and transparent evidential basis. Next, we performed a scientometric analysis using bibliometric tools like VOSviewer to examine citation trends, keywords, leading authors, and prominent journals. This research analyzes the temporal aspect of existing models of bitemporal systems. Also, it summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of bitemporal databases from existing studies. It examines each use case that adopted bitemporality in its research and identifies the research gaps. Finally, it reveals the new research directions for upcoming technologies like Artificial Intelligence, cloud architecture, blockchain, and improvement of bitemporal databases to detect their probable use in various domains like supply chain, healthcare, and financial. The originality of this research contributes to the existing knowledge by offering a scientometric analysis alongside a systematic literature review while also identifying critical research gaps that need to be addressed in future studies.