The Intellectual Structure of Social and Sustainable Public Procurement Research: A Co-Citation Analysis

Abstract

Public procurement has recently taken into account social and sustainable factors, increasing academic literature in this field. The aim of this paper is to map the intellectual structure of social and sustainable public procurement research by means of delimiting the scientific domain’s research traditions, its disciplinary composition, and influential research topics. Given that there is a literature gap in bibliometric studies applied to this field, we conducted a co-citation analysis to identify the intellectual structure of this area of knowledge. Co-citation analyses identify networks of interconnections and, consequently, detect the most (and the least) active research areas, being a good complement to traditional literature reviews. This article contributes to science development because it is the first paper to carry out a bibliometric analysis in the field of social and sustainable public procurement, as well as the first one to conduct a co-citation analysis among public procurement research. Consequently, it is also the first article to detect which papers have become burst in this research field. The results show twelve different clusters of publications that were cited by researchers who wrote papers on social and sustainable public procurement. In other words, the sources of knowledge that scholars used as references are analysed, identifying papers that can be considered turning points, as well as those that became specially cited over a discrete period of time. Six different research trends were identified over the last decade in regard to social and sustainable public procurement research. The conclusions highlight the relevance of the findings, especially because they provide guidance to researchers when conducting literature reviews, given that the most significant journals and papers are identified.

Exploring the intellectual structure of research in codes of ethics: A bibliometric analysis

“…In our case, these trends correspond to the three main lines of research (behavior; content; effectiveness). This correspondence does not usually occur in other social science research fields (Pascual Nebreda et al., 2021; Torres‐Pruñonosa et al., 2021), where, in the same period, trends related to different lines of research occur. This shows a linear evolution of the research field and suggests that research in codes of ethics is still developing an initial research stage that is focused on providing answers to foundational issues such as purpose (Ford & Richardson, 1994; Stevens, 1994), content (Kaptein, 2004) or implementation/effectiveness (Kaptein, 2015; Webley & Werner, 2008).…”

A Visualization Analysis of Crisis and Risk Communication Research Using CiteSpace

“…Counting citations adds value to the excellent research work in a field, while higher co-citations play an essential role in reflecting the academic structure and tracking the evolution of a particular field [ 28 , 29 ]. Nodes represent co-cited references, as shown in Figure 9 .…”

Corporate Social Responsibility and Marketing: A Bibliometric and Visualization Analysis of the Literature between the Years 1994 and 2020

“…Software is vital to scientific research; it assists scientists in identifying research questions, analyzing data, visualizing results, and disseminating knowledge [69]. There are several tools that can be used for bibliometric analysis: VOSviewer [70], CiteSpace [71], SciMAT [72], CitNetExplorer [73], BibExcel [74] e Sci2Tool [75]. The study by Pan et al [69] compared some visualization software, highlighting that VOSviewer has been the most used in bibliometric analysis in recent years, also the fastest growing.…”