ABSTRACT

This paper aims to establish the differences between the production and the visibility of research papers about sustainable supply chain which appear in Scopus indexed journals. The text mining process was made by taking the geographical origin of the authors as search and classification criterion. In our analysis, we try to establish the relevance of the information given by the articles descriptors. The purpose of this chapter is to provide researchers in the field with elements and analysis that facilitate the understanding of knowledge production dynamics in this subject matter.

We analyzed 38,122 terms from the abstracts of 2,893 articles indexed in Scopus between 1996 and 2018. In addition, the 5,277 terms extracted from articles titles were considered. One main finding is the fact that the subject matter of “sustainable supply chain” has been studied from about 2008 and, for this reason, is not very recent. The number of papers from Latin America represents only 5.36%, which may be interpreted as if the subject matter is still far from the research interests in that region. Considering this issue, the Brazilian researchers, who write papers in association with researchers from other countries out of the region, lead the intellectual production of the field in Latin America. Despite that, their papers are not well cited, researchers from China lead the academic production in the field.

The text mining analysis established that the main interests and production for the studied period are: the application of sustainable supply chain to industrial organization, empirical research and good practices, optimization styles and decision-making, sustainability and carbon footprint, analysis and measurement, concepts, hierarchical analysis, evaluation, environmental impact, sustainable supply chain network, game theory, and cooperation.

Finally, there is evidence that Colombia, Chile, Mexico, and Cuba present a high cooperation level in publications, while Argentina has strength in collaboration with Spain, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Puerto Rico. Brazil, which accounts for the greater part of the production in the Latin American region, produce its publications in cooperation with French-speaking countries institutions: Algeria, France, Luxemburg, and Morocco.