A systematic literature review on the blood supply chain: exploring the trend and future research directions

Blood supply chain (BSC) management represents a vital and challenging task; blood is essentially needed, and in cases it is not available, patients may face death or other serious consequences. The BSC involves numerous complicated factors such as uncertainties in blood supply/demand, blood type distribution, limitations associated with blood shelf life, and production and collection methods. Given these issues, researchers have focused on developing efficient methodologies that could strike a balance between blood supply and demand, while minimizing blood shortage/waste. Review studies could help to highlight the findings and trends in this research area. The purpose of this study was to provide a systematic literature review of research on the BSC, using a bibliometric method. Such an approach was not previously used in the literature. Identifying and analyzing the impacts of the existing publications, the study could help researchers and institutions interested in this field to recognize hot topics and research trends. In doing so, the study investigated the articles published in journals indexed on Web of Science (WoS) between 1990 and August 2021, by considering three keyword echelons. As such, 485 articles were found and systematically analyzed. The study used content analysis software to compute author influence and affiliation statistics, while conducting citation analysis, co-citation analysis, keyword analysis, and co-word analysis. Furthermore, through co-word analysis and keyword co-occurrence analysis, the hot topics in research on the BSC were identified. The study also specifically investigated the supply chain of red blood cells, although it did not separately explore other blood by-products.