Identifying PLM themes, trends and clusters through ten years of scientific publications

Abstract

PLM encompasses a wide array of expertise, from designing green products to digital factories, with perspectives ranging from an IT standpoint to business strategies, encompassing products, processes and services. Hence, identifying the contours of PLM as a science through the themes, trends and clusters of its scientific literature is very challenging. At the same time, being able to portray PLM will benefit the PLM community, including researchers and practitioners, and should help foresee its future. This work examines PLM research bibliometric trends over the last ten years. We review the scientific literature published in English from 2005 to 2014 in peer-reviewed journals and conferences. Paper keywords are analyzed so as to identify trends and reveal the clusters of related themes based on the occurrences of words and the frequency of associations between them. Amongst the findings we observe that PLM coverage is both very large (2847 keywords being used over a decade) and very thin (2134 of these keywords appear only once in the decade). We also observe that the keyword showing the highest increase is Building Information Modeling (BIM).