Sustainability and Data Envelopment Analysis: A bibliometric review

Environmental management is important for all nations in terms of sustainable development. Several methods were created to analyze the environmental sustainability, being the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) one of the main approaches. However, there is no consensus on the best models and variables to build sustainable indicators. This article aims to map the literature of DEA sustainable indicators through a bibliometric analysis, searching 6,330 articles on the Web of Science. Our main finding revealed 10 clusters and the existence of several authors and journals, although the publications are concentrated on few relevant ones. Also, the DEA models analysis reveals the model CRS stands out, representing 24% of the sample, followed by CRS and VRS with 12%. We also observed that the trend topics “innovation”, “empirical evidence” and “urbanization” were the most approached in the last four years. This study provides a platform for future research in Sustainability and DEA.