Blockchain Technology Applied to Supply Chain Management: A Systems’ Analysis

Abstract

Blockchain technology can be used to record real data at various nodes in the entire supply chain and can achieve timely data sharing and full traceability of the whole lifecycle of products in the supply chain. This study conducts a systematic literature review based on the WOS database, focusing on the research topic of the application of blockchain technology in supply chain management. We propose clear search and screening criteria based on 4 research questions and finally obtain 591 target studies. We conduct a detailed study on the distribution of the target literature in this research area, country/region, institution, and journal. Different countries/regions cooperate with each other and, thus, are clustered into five significant countries regions’ cooperation networks. There is a strong coupling relationship between research institutions, forming four major institutional cooperation networks. According to the analysis of those papers with a high number of citations, most of such papers were published in 2019, while the cross-citation phenomenon between papers occurred more frequently in 2021 and 2022. We use VOSviewer for visual coupling analysis of all keywords, which are automatically clustered into three research hotspots. Using CiteSpace to perform timeline-based keyword cooccurrence analysis, we find that scholars have gone through a “discovery-acceptance-question-improvement” process for the application of blockchain technology in supply chain management. According to the intensity and duration of burst detection words in different years, we draw three key points for future research. (i) Blockchain technology should be used to restructure and optimize the high-end food and medical cold chain supply chains. (ii) Blockchain technology should be used to enhance the cooperative relationship between supply chain members and the overall competitiveness of the supply chain. (iii) Innovate blockchain encryption technology that should be used to reduce the risk of information and privacy leakage in the supply chain.