Popular in SC Resilience

Posted on 2015-11-27 by

Revised on: 2015-11-27

What are the Top of the Pops of Supply Chain Resilience papers? That could be the fitting title for A Citation Analysis of the Research on Supply Chain Resilience where Christian Wankmüller and Gottfried Seebacher analyse current and past literature and manage to find the 8 most cited and influential papers on supply chain resilience.

Finding what matters most

In scope and approach this paper is very similar to a paper I reviewed a couple of weeks ago, which looked at research strands and interlinkages in papers on supply chain risk management. This analysis here looks at supply chain resilience in particular, and so, what did these authors find?

Below is a list of what they found to be the eight most cited papers in supply chain resilience research. Six of these have been reviewed on this blog, so I’ve done my homework well so to speak.

Christopher, M. and Peck, H. (2004) Building the resilient supply chain
Ponomarov, S. and Holcomb, M. (2009) Understanding the concept of supply chain
resilience
Sheffi, Y. and Rice, J. (2005) A supply chain view of the resilient enterprise
Norrman, A. and Jansson, U. (2004) Ericsson’s proactive supply chain risk
management approach after a serious sub-supplier accident
Sheffi, Y. (2001) Supply Chain Management under the Threat of International
Terrorism
Rice, J. and Caniato, F. (2003) Building a secure and resilient supply network
Juttner, U., Peck, C., Christopher, M. (2003) Supply Chain Risk Management:
Outlining an Agenda for Future Research
Chopra, S. and Sodhi, M. (2004) Managing risk to avoid supply-chain breakdown

Unsurprisingly, it is Christopher and Peck (2004) that appears to be the most cited paper, 19 times since its publication. More surprising – to me – is Ponomarov and Holcomb (2009), a paper I haven’t heard about at all. Sheffi (2001) I have read, but never gotten around to review.

Critique

This is a good paper that is well-written and quantitative literature reviews like this one are always interesting. While the work and research leading up to papers like this one is perhaps boring and tedious and not building a new frontier or going where no man has gone before in this field of research, the result may be very rewarding to the reader like me who may find papers he has never heard of. And indeed, I did find new papers here that I must read.

However, if there is to be one bad apple that spoils the barrel it is the fact that not all literature from the above figure is mentioned in the references of this paper. Perhaps the authors thought that these were papers of less importance and not worth mentioning, I don’t know, but for the sake of accuracy I think they should have been mentioned. Fortunately I do know several of these “omitted” papers, but others I don’t, and finding them by the name of the author(s) and year of publication alone isn’t always easy.

Reference

Wankmüller, C. and Seebacher, G. (2015) A Citation Analysis of the Research on Supply Chain Resilience. Paper presented at the 22nd EurOMA Conference, June 26th – July 1st, 2015, Neuchatel, Switzerland