Research perspectives of supply chain knowledge management: A bibliometrics study

The purpose of this article is to present a bibliometric analysis of scientific publications on knowledge management (KM) and supply chain (SC), provide an overview of research activities in this field and recognise its most substantial and fundamental aspects. In addition, this study aims to quantitatively analyse KM in SC in other words supply chain knowledge management (SCKM) research trends, forecasts and citations from 1999 to 2021 in Web of Science (WOS). A total of 499 documents related to SCKM research were collected from the following databases: SCI-EXPAND, SSCI, AHCI and ESCI. These documents were carefully reviewed and subjected to bibliometric data analysis techniques. We map the time trend, disciplinary distribution, high-frequency keywords and topics, major authors and influential publications to show emerging topics. Based on the findings of other researchers, many implications emerged that improve one’s understanding of the identity of SCKM as a distinct multi-discipline scientific field, and its publication has grown significantly since 2018. SC papers were published in engineering and Operations Research and Management Science journals, while the coverage of research topics related to KM and SCKM is broader and more interdisciplinary than those of SC papers. High-frequency keywords associated with SCKM research are listed. From the citation of 499 papers with both KM and SC as keywords, we find the most popular one.