Research trends in sustainable operation: a bibliographic coupling clustering analysis from 1988 to 2016

Considering the vital importance on pursuing sustaining competitive advantage and long-term success for enterprises, sustainable operation has aroused extensive interests in academia and industry. Understanding the trend can fill the research gap between theory and practice. It is vital not only to implement relevant research to help firms obtain sustainability, but also to find what has been studied till now and what need further exploration in the near future. This paper applied automatic content analysis approach from scientometrics to identify the trend of researches on sustainable operation. The database came from Web of Science during 1988-2015. Specifically, a multi-stage clustering technique based on bibliographic coupling has also been introduced to examine which topics, which research trend, and which new ideas contribute to the scientific journal fields of sustainable operation. Our results identified that energy related journals were the classic magazines in sustainable operation field and energy technology was the top topic. USA, UK and Germany had contributed the most journal articles in this field. With the rapid expansion of Asia, Asian scientists, like South Korea and Singapore, also published many sustainable operation papers. It had been a novel trend that the sustainable operation research field was incorporating a broader range of cultural backgrounds and combined with supply chain management.