The latest trends in logistics and supply chain management research

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What is at the forefront of current research in supply chain management and logistics right now? I know, thanks to to Gyöngi Kovács at interorganisational.org, who attended the NOFOMA 2009 conference a couple of days ago. At the conference, Emerald, one of the world’s leading publishers of management journals, presented some statistics on which articles that were most downloaded from their online journals during the first quarter of 2009.

Top of the pops

Why are downloads interesting? As more and more journals go online, the number of downloads an article has measures how popular or sought after an article is. Downloads are interesting because they not only reveal what is read but also which topics academics currently work on or what ‘previous’ and ‘published’ research they use in their current work. So what DO academics work on? Mind you, the list is based on the Emerald statistics for IJLM, IJPDLM and SCM:IJ, so it is highly selective and highly biased, and thus not fully representative. Nonetheless, it does suggest that some themes have a higher readership than others:

Supply chain risk management
- Christopher & Lee (2004)
  Mitigating supply chain risk through improved confidence
Supply chain integration and collaboration
- Pålsson & Johansson’s (2009)
  Supply chain integration obtained through uniquely labelled goods
Corporate social responsibility, ethics, and green/reverse supply chains
- Hanafi et al. (2008)
  Reverse logistics strategies for end-of-life products
Lean and agile supply chains
- Masson et al. (2007)
  Managing complexity in agile global fashion industry supply chains
E-commerce
- Cho et al. (2008)
  Logistics capability, logistics outsourcing and firm performance in an e-commerce market
RFID
- Spekman &Sweeney (2006)
  RFID: from concept to implementation

I am not at all surprised that corporate responsibility and green/reverse logistics rank high on the list, and they are certainly not going to be less popular in the future, as noted by Betty Feng in her post on green versus efficient.

Other hotbeds

Several other fields also make an impact, and again, no surprises here:

Value chain analysis
Humanitarian logistics
Demand management
Logistics outsourcing
Warehousing and inventory management
Transportation
Implementation of SCM

A fuller list of articles (but without links) can be found at interorganisational.org. If I can find the time and inspiration for it I will try to assemble a list like above with links for all the articles mentioned.

And the trend?

Well, quoting Gyöngi,

Integration, CSR, risk management, even humanitarian logistics were already hot topics the last time we looked at them. Optimisation doesn’t make the list any more – though that can be due to the convenience sample of these very journals. The same goes for customisation and modularisation, and supply chain design. “Global” this and that has been dropped.

So now you know what to research, if you want to be in the hot seat.

And I have a lot of reading to do…

Reference

Pålsson, H., & Johansson, O. (2009). Supply chain integration obtained through uniquely labelled goods: A survey of Swedish manufacturing industries International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, 39 (1), 28-46 DOI: 10.1108/09600030910929174

Christopher, M., & Lee, H. (2004). Mitigating supply chain risk through improved confidence International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, 34 (5), 388-396 DOI: 10.1108/09600030410545436

Hanafi, J., Kara, S., & Kaebernick, H. (2008). Reverse logistics strategies for end-of-life products The International Journal of Logistics Management, 19 (3), 367-388 DOI: 10.1108/09574090810919206

Masson, R., Iosif, L., MacKerron, G., & Fernie, J. (2007). Managing complexity in agile global fashion industry supply chains The International Journal of Logistics Management, 18 (2), 238-254 DOI: 10.1108/09574090710816959

Cho, J., Ozment, J., & Sink, H. (2008). Logistics capability, logistics outsourcing and firm performance in an e-commerce market International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, 38 (5), 336-359 DOI: 10.1108/09600030810882825

Spekman, R., & II, P. (2006). RFID: from concept to implementation International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, 36 (10), 736-754 DOI: 10.1108/09600030610714571

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