Emerging Topics in Supply Chain Management Literature: A Scientometric Analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze the intellectual structure of the supply chain management (SCM) field, identify publishing patterns, and measure interest in the topic across fields, journals, regions, and institutions. The investigation focuses especially on the most recent publications to identify emerging topics in the field. The analysis was performed on a sample of 11,085 SCM publications indexed in the Web of Science and published between January 2010 and August 2021. Authors’ productivity was analyzed in terms of the number of published works and the number of times cited. Finally, the citation counts for individual articles captured the most fundamental works and gauged new dominant interests in the field. The results indicate that the number of publications more than doubled after the beginning of 2018, especially articles focusing on supply chain sustainability and green supply chains. The document co-citation network helped outline the dominant themes in the SCM literature: supply chain integration, green SCM, sustainable SCM, supplier selection, and supply chain risk management. Most importantly, emerging SCM topics were identified: SCM critical success factors, blockchain technology, big data analytics, and the circular economy.