A bibliometric analysis of the research published on the subject of smart grids for a period from 2012 to 2017 was carried out, and the use of metadata obtained from Web Of Science was taken for this analysis.Our search identified a total of 1998 publications related to smart grids in the period studied.We analyzed patterns of publication output, major journals, productivity of countries and institutions, collaboration between countries and an analysis of keywords by author.The annual number of publications on smart grid research increased from 61 in 2012 to 1998 in 2017.The magazine that had the most productivity in this period was the IEEE transactions on Smart grid.The United States was the country that contributed the most publications on a global level to the research topic during the period under study.The most productive institution was the Nanyang Technology University with a total of 1.9% of publications, followed by University Waterloo with 1.4%, and Zhejiang University 1.4%, are part of the top 3.In the collaboration network is you can see that the United States is the country that had the most collaboration with the others in the network, since I occupy the center of it.In the keywords of the authors, it is evident that the most used word was Smart that was in a total of 1988 publications that represent 99.5%.