Foundations of logistics and supply chain research: a bibliometric analysis of four international journals

The purpose of this paper is to explore the current intellectual foundation of four leading academic journals within the field of logistics and supply chain management. We were interested to identify the most frequently quoted publications as well as their impact on logistics research. We examined 17,000 references of 412 papers and further analysed the 39 top-references with the means of multidimensional scaling (MDS), cluster- and factor analysis. We were able to identify a mix of textbooks and articles from academic journals and revealed a journal-specific citation pattern, not only in the choice of textbooks but also in the choice of referenced methodology papers. We were also able to identify citation streams and citation areas, where it was surprising to find so many general socio-scientific papers and general papers explaining the character of the field.