A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF THE APPLICATION OF SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS IN SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT

Background: This paper presents a bibliometric overview of research published application of social network analysis in supply chain management in recent decades. It may be useful for showing the most important problems in this area. With this aim, Citespace is used to analyse the literature on the application of social network analysis in supply chain management to clarify the development and research trend. Bibliometric analysis is the quantitative study of bibliographic material. It provides a general picture of a research field that can be classified by papers, authors, and journals. The main objective of this study is to investigate the knowledge domain about application social network analysis in the supply chain field and reveal the thematic patterns and topics of high interest to researchers to predict emerging trends in the literature.

Methods: To investigate the growth of studies about the applicable social network in supply chain management, 647 articles were reviewed by CiteSpace software. These papers were collected from the Core Collection of Thomson Reuters and published in 16 journals in operations research and management science from 2004 to 2021. Document co-citation analysis, clustering analysis, and citation burst detection were conducted to investigate and examine the thematic patterns, emerging trends, and critical articles of the knowledge domain.

Results: Social network approaches are increasingly popular in the supply chain. Four major clusters are discussed in detail, namely multi-objective optimization, sustainable supply chain, supply network, and circular economy. Three research trends of supply chain network design, structural characteristics, and supplier selection and evaluation were identified based on citation bursts analysis.

Conclusions: The present study offers a new approach to visualizing relevant data to synthesize scientific research findings of the application of social network analysis in supply chain management. Additionally, directions for future research in this area are presented.