Thirty years of the International Journal of Logistics Management – a retrospective analysis

Pages173-208
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/IJLM-03-2020-0121
Date13 June 2020
Published date13 June 2020
AuthorBritta Gammelgaard,Satish Kumar,Debidutta Pattnaik,Rohit Joshi
Subject MatterLogistics,Management science & operations
Thirty years of the International
Journal of Logistics Management
a retrospective analysis
Britta Gammelgaard
Operations Management, Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark
Satish Kumar and Debidutta Pattnaik
Department of Management Studies, Malaviya National Institute of Technology,
Jaipur, India, and
Rohit Joshi
Operations and Quantitative Techniques, Indian Institute of Management Shillong,
Shillong, India
Abstract
Purpose International Journal of Logistics Management (IJLM) celebrated 30 years of its publication in 2019.
This study provides a retrospective overview of the IJLM articles between 1990 and 2019.
Design/methodology/approach The authors applied bibliometrics to study and present a retrospective
summary of the publication trends, citations, pattern of authorship, productivity, popularity depicting
influence, and the impact of the IJLM, its contributors, their affiliations, and discusses the conceptual layout of
IJLMs prolific themes.
Findings With 23 yearly articles, IJLM contributed 689 specialized research papers on Supply Chain
Management (SCM) by 2019. Authorship grew by 42 new contributors adding up to 1,256 unique IJLM authors
by 2019. Each of its lead contributors associated with 1.55 other authors to contribute an article inthe journal
among which 93% are citedat least once. Survey-based research dominated in last 30 years. The h-index of the
journal is 73 while its g-index suggests that 133 IJLM articles were cited at least 17,689 times in Scopus. IJLM
authors affiliated to the CranfieldUniversity and the US contributed the highest count of articles. Bibliographic
coupling analysis groups IJLM articles into eight bibliographic clusters while network analysis exposes the
thematic layout of IJLM articles.
Research limitations/implications The literature selection is confined to the Scopus database starting
from 1990, a year before the inception of the IJLM, thereby limiting its scope.
Originality/value This study is the first retrospective bibliometric analysis of the IJLM, which is useful for
aspiring contributors.
Keywords International journal of logistics management, Scopus, Bibliometrics, Bibliographic coupling,
Network analysis, Co-word analysis
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Prof. Doug Lambert and Prof. Martin Christopher founde d the IJLM for sensi tizing
audiences on the need for more practical insights to strengthen the relevance of scientific
contributions of logistics management across the Atlantic. This vision, along with the
expansion of the international aspect of logistics management research, is still the guiding
outlook for the journal (Gammelgaard, 2019) with Prof. Britta Gammelgaard serving as the
current Editor.
As the result of its founding vision and the able guidanceof its editors, the IJLM features
among the top 50 outlets specialized in the area of transportation research in Scimagos
Journal Ranking (SJR). The source normalized impact per paper (SNIP) for the journal is
1.134 with an h-index of 66, implying that at least 66 of IJLM manuscripts are cited at least
66 times excluding self-citations. It is ranked Ain the Australian Business Deans Council
Thirty years of
the IJLM
173
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0957-4093.htm
Received 9 March 2020
Revised 6 May 2020
Accepted 6 May 2020
The International Journal of
Logistics Management
Vol. 31 No. 2, 2020
pp. 173-208
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0957-4093
DOI 10.1108/IJLM-03-2020-0121
(ABDC) 2019. Publications in the journal reveal that from 7 articles in its inaugural issue,
IJLM has advanced to 689 manuscripts confined to its core theme by 2019. Such a rise in the
quantum of publication heightens the need for an in-depth retrospection over its thirty
years to track the evolution of the journal to see the way forward. Simultaneously, it is also
important to suggest areas which aspiring contributors may target for the future issues of
the journal.
In recent times, a large number of academic sources apply bibliometrics, also k nown as
scientometric s, to quantify thei r contributions and analyse the research areas with the
intention of strategizing future policies. More than a trend, the need for a quantitative
perspective in modern times is crucial due to the phenomenal rise in research activities
resultinginanaccumulationofpublications for scientific work. Therefore, deep
introspection is essential to historicize the quantum of accomplishments.
Simultaneously, it also illuminates and provides directions for future orientation. With
such motivation, Donthu et al. (2020a) carried out a bibliometric overview of the 45 years
journey of the Journal of Business Research and Baker et al. (2020b) analysed the corpus of
first 25 years of th e Journalof Corporate Finance.Wang et al . (2018)have investigated the
accomplishments over 20 years for the International Journal of Logistics Research and
Laengle et al. (2017) have analysed the 40 years of the European Journal of Operational
Research as well. Thus irrespective of the academic disciplines, we found that the need for
such research is well established.
Recently the IJLM published an editorial reflecting the qualitative advancements of the
journal over 30 years (Gammelgaard, 2019). A similar content analysis was also carried out
for the first twenty years of the IJLM (Liao-Troth et al., 2012). However, the quantitative
perspectives remained unaddressed which prompted us to consider this endeavour. This
study essentially examines the IJLM with the following research questions (RQs):
RQ1. How have the publications, authorship, and citations grown over the IJLMs
three decades of publishing?
RQ2. Which IJLM articles are the most frequently followed in academia?
RQ3. Which research methods are used for IJLM articles?
RQ4. Who are the prolific contributors to IJLM?
RQ5. Which institutions and nations are IJLM authors the most frequently
affiliated with?
RQ6. Over which sources and countries do IJLM articles find the most influence?
RQ7. How has research in terms of supply chain management evolved over the 30 years
of the journal?
RQ8. How do the IJLMs most prolific contributors, authorsaffiliations and its frequently
discussed themes converge intellectually?
The study uses the Scopus database for obtaining the requisite bibliographic data and
applies bibliometrics to answer the research questions. Along with an extensive range of
descriptive indicators, this work also presents the graphical overview of bibliographic
couplings and co-occurrences of the keywords specified by its authors using the Gephi and
the Visualization of similarities (VOS) viewer software. Apart from showing certain
indications, the study unfolds the networking and associations present in the IJLM articles
through analysing the available metadata.
This study contributes primarily through providing the first retrospective overview of the
IJLM between 1990 and 2019. Its findings may be useful for the editors of the IJLM to map the
IJLM
31,2
174
way forward for the journal. More importantly, the study suggests ample avenues, which
aspiring contributors can target in order to enhance their chances of being published in the
journal. Some of which include the influence of pandemics like COVID 19 on global supply
chain, supply chain risk management, and the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) and
blockchain technology in redefining the management of logistics. The remainder of the paper
organises itself with the following divisions: Section 2 provides an overview of the study
methods while Section 3 discuss the descriptive statistics. Section 4 goes on to analyse the
clustering of IJLM articles while Section 5 visualises the bibliometric networks for those
articles. Finally, Section 6 summarises the key findings of the study and concludes the paper.
2. Methodology
Bibliometric studies classify the available data and construct meaningful summaries of the
bibliographic material (Pritchard, 1969;Broadus, 1987) pertaining to journals, research areas,
universities and/or countries (Chung and Cox, 1990;Blanco-Mesa et al., 2017;Merig
oet al.,
2019;Mas-Tur et al., 2019;Baker et al., 2020a,2020b,2020c). Given the scope of the project and
the usage of data obtained from the Scopus database, the bibliometric overview of IJLM is
presented as descriptive and network analyses (Baker et al., 2020a,2020b,2020c;Donthu
et al., 2020a,2020b). Descriptive analyses constitute an analysis of the total number of
publications, citations and citations per publication. The influence of the journal, its authors,
and/or their affiliations are indicated through an h-index while the g-index represents impact.
The network analyses expound on bibliographic coupling and the co-occurrence of keywords
specified by the author (Kessler, 1963;Callon et al., 1983;Ravikumar et al., 2015).
It is generally believed that a body of literature exhibits intellectual convergence or
divergence by citing similar or different scientific works. Kessler (1963) explained that when
two or more documentsexhibit similar referencesource(s), they develop a bibliographiccouple
indicating the traceof intellectual association among the citing documents.In contrast to the
views presented by Kessler; Small (1973) believed that when two or more references are
common across documents, the co-citeddocs may denote similar intellectualideas influencing
the citing document(s), whereas the co-occurrence of the keywords indicates conceptual
(thematic) similarities among the literature (Callon et al.,1983;Ravikumar et al.,2015).
We used MSExcel, VOSviewer, and Gephi applications to carry out the analyses
indicated. MSExcel was used to clean up the bibliographic records obtained from Scopus
and to carry out the descriptive analyses. We used VOSviewer to generate the network files
(Bastian et al., 2009) and applied the tools available in Gephi (van Eck and Waltman, 2010)to
visualize the bibliographic networks for the IJLM articles. Figure 1 provides the design of the
present study.
3. Results
As per Scopus, the IJLM published 719 documents between 1990 and 2019. However, the
application of certain filters notably a minimum pagination length of 5 along with the
presence of valid author information reduced the quantum of documents studied to 689
records which included 613 articles, 38 reviews, 6 editorials, and 32 conference papers. We
used all of these records for the analyses.
3.1 Trends in publication and citation structure in the IJLM
Table 1 shows the publication trends, the structures underlying the citations, productivity,
influence, and the impact of the IJLM between 1990 and 2019 while Figure 2 depicts the
patterns of authorship evident in its articles.
Commencing with 15 publications in 1990, the IJLM begot its specialized repository of 689
supply chain management (SCM) articles by the end of 2019. Simultaneously, the number of
Thirty years of
the IJLM
175

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