Circular Supply Chain Management (CSCM): a network structure analysis and the bibliometrics of published articles on the WOS and Scopus database

This paper aims to propose a systematic view of how Circular Supply Chain Management (CSCM) captures and evolves the state-of-the-art advances in this field. Multiple analyzes have been performed with two tools of VOSviewer and open-source R-package ‘bibliometrix”. Also, a network and bibliometric analysis of the Co-Occurrence, Co-Authorship, and Co-Citation has been made on CSCM using bibliometric and scientometrics methods on the literature available on the Web of Science and Scopus databases.

Design/methodology/approach:

 Bibliometric, network structure, and descriptive analysis have been used to investigate publications on the subject of circular supply chain management. For this purpose, a systematic review has been performed using the Prisma review protocol. After defining the research objectives and questions, the relevant keywords for the sources and database and search codes have been used for an online search. Then, the initial search has been conducted. The next step involved screening the study results. 116 published articles have been selected from Scopus for analysis. The potential papers were then downloaded in CSV format for bibliometric analysis and synthesis. The final data for this research has been selected from 2010 to 2021. All the data was exported in CSV format to the Bibliometrix and Vosviewer software for data analysis. Also, Co-Authorship, word Co-Occurrence, and Co-Citation analysis have been generated using VOSviewer.

This study analyzed the annual publication trends, the most productive authors, the most cited articles, the most productive affiliations, the most important journals, the most productive countries, and keywords. Collaboration, co-occurrence, co-authors, co-citation, and historiographical analysis were also performed in this study. Findings indicated that "Perona, M" and "Mina, H" with six and five articles were the most productive authors in the development of this field. Also, Geissdoerfer's article was the most cited article with 231 citations, and it can be considered a pioneering work in the field of CSCM development. Farooq's article was also the most cited local article. Govindan et al.'s (2020) article were the most important in co-citation analysis. Great Britain and Italy were the most productive countries with 70 and 66 publications. Cambridge University was the most productive university in England. The "Journal of Cleaner Production" and "Sustainability" were the most visited journal with 24 and 8 articles. The most dominant keywords were "circular economy" and "circular supply chain". The main keywords shared in the most advanced cluster were "circular economy", "circular supply chain", and "supply chain". The main common keywords in cluster 2 included "supply chain management" and "circular supply chain management", and the main common keywords in cluster 3 included "sustainability, and “closed loop supply chain". Also, major cooperated countries included Great Britain, Italy, and China. Strong cooperation between Iran and Denmark, China and Australia, and Britain, and India was also observed. A significant number of articles were written by Iranian researchers, and the number of citations received by foreign researchers was higher. The authorship of the articles included two, one, and three authors, respectively. The results indicated the existence of the development of CSCM with quantitative modeling approaches, proficient algorithms, optimization techniques, and integrated multi-criteria decision-making techniques. Also, CSCM research must identify enablers, drivers, Critical Success Factors (CSF), obstacles and barriers, innovative frameworks, and circular business models.

Research limitations/implications:

 The papers were merely reviewed in the form of scientific and English language journal articles. Other datasets and conference papers, reports, and books can be considered for future study, but they were not included in the structural literature review.

Practical implications: 

CSCM is rapidly developing in supply chain sustainability and can operate as a guide for companies. To apply CSCM, three questions need to be answered:  i) which business/supply chain models should companies choose (closed loop or circular)?; ii) how does it cover supply chain operations to achieve a zero-waste perspective?; and iii) how does the company redesign its supply chain and implement a circular supply chain?

Social implications: 

The application of the results of this study and circular supply chain indicators have positive effects on the sustainability and circular economy.

Originality/value:

 This research is one of the early attempts to analyze the structure of social networks in CSCM using bibliometric and scientometric methods. In previous studies relevant to CSCM, mainly the structured literature review, content analysis, and integrated framework have been used, and few studies have addressed CSCM using bibliometric analysis. In this paper, the R-software was used for the first time as a tool for bibliometric data statistics (open-source R-package tool ‘Bibliometrix’ supplemented by VOS viewer, which is used for clustering and data visualization). Also, the results of the analysis of the two software were compared.