A text mining based overview of inventory research in the ISIR special issues 1994-2016

When a research field achieves a certain maturity, it becomes useful for future research to obtain a structured overview of the field: how did it evolve in the past? Where does it currently stand? In what direction does it (possibly) evolve? The purpose of our paper is to offer an overview of inventory research published in the special issues of ISIR (International Society for Inventory Research) Symposia, one of the most important forums of leading inventory research. This paper focuses on the following two research questions: (1) what are the major topics of inventory research in ISIR special issues? and (2) how do important research topics within ISIR special issues evolve over time? We apply text mining as a novel method of content analysis, relying on the 12 special issues of ISIR published in the International Journal of Production Economics between 1994 and 2016, covering 566 papers. The relevance of text mining is based on a structured analysis of literature review type papers in the field of inventory research; this offers a basis for identifying the main topics and terms in the field. Text mining results are further investigated by statistical methods to identify key research areas and their evolution over time.