Operations research/management science research in Europe: a bibliometric overview

Abstract

This paper provides a bibliometric analysis of the articles in the field of operations research or management science (OR/MS) published in the years 1980-2018 by European researchers. The analysis's objective is to identify and examine the current state of OR/MS studies in Europe, which publishes about 38% of the papers published worldwide. The analysis was based on the data from the Web of Science (WoS) databases. We found a total of 65,352 papers in 148 different journals in the OR/MS field. The results provide a general picture of the studies, which are classified according to the most influential authors, institutions, papers, and journals. The study revealed that the ratio of OR/MS studies having at least one European author has steadily increased over the decades from 28.27% in the 1980 s to 41.29% in the 2010 s. The analysis also provides citation statistics of the European OR/MS articles. The study concluded that the impact of European publications is less than the impact of U.S. publications. The bibliometric analysis of the studies showed that only a small portion of the countries/regions, institutions, and even authors published a substantial portion of the papers, as indicated by the Pareto rule. The research trends have been identified through an analysis of keyword usage over the years. In keyword analysis, which subcategories are studied together is also identified. In the paper, collaboration among countries and institutions is also identified and depicted by using VOS viewer.