Supply Chain Management: A Review and Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Supply chain management (SCM), which generally refers to horizontal integration management, has steadily become the core competitiveness of company rivalry and an essential approach to developing national comprehensive and national strength since the end of the 20th century due to the numerous needs arising from a competitive international economy. Manufacturers develop a community of interest by forming long-term strategic partnerships with suppliers and vendors throughout the supply chain. This paper defines supply chain management by reviewing the existing literature and discusses the current state of supply chain management research, as well as prospective research directions. Specifically, we conducted a bibliometric analysis of the influential studies of SCM in terms of various aspects, such as research areas, journals, countries/regions, institutions, authors and corresponding authors, most cited publications, and author keywords, based on the 8998 reviews and articles collected from the SCI and SSCI database of the Web of Science (WoS) between 2010 and 2020. The results show that the major research areas were Management (3071, 34.13%), Operations Research & Management Science (2680, 29.78%), and Engineering, Industrial (1854, 20.60%) with TP and TPR%. The most productive journal and institution were J. Clean Prod and Hong Kong Polytech Univ with a TP of 554 and 238, respectively. China, USA, and UK were the top three contributing countries. Furthermore, “sustainability”, “green supply chain (management)”, and “sustainable supply chain (management)” were the most popular author keywords in recent three years and since 2010, apart from the author keywords of SCM. When combined with the most cited articles in recent years, the application of block chain and Industry 4.0 in supply chain management increased rapidly and generated great attention.