A bibliometric analysis of comparative research on the evolution of international and Chinese green supply chain research hotspots and frontiers.

Abstract

Green supply chain (GSC), one of the most vital sub-topics of sustainable development, indicates people provoking on the rationality of business practices and resource consumption patterns. Under the background of economy globalization, developing countries, especially China, severely affected by green barriers became the global focus. A systematic review of articles about GSC which published in leading journals of Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) and China Knowledge Resource Infrastructure (CNKI) is proposed for exploring publishing trends, the distribution of authors and journals, research topics, and hotspots and predicting frontiers by utilizing VOSviewer, Sci2, and CiteSpace. The results show that (1) there are differences in the attention of GSC between international and Chinese academia. (2) "Green" is referred to environmental friendly practices in international academia. Scholars advocate to promote management to strengthen cooperation among GSC members and boost technology investment to improve the comprehensive performance; however, specific practices such as "low-carbon," "emission reduction," "recycling," and "remanufacture" are referred to environmental friendly behaviors in Chinese academia. Scholars expect to avoid enterprises' short-term profit compression relying on government subsidies and make contracts to share environment protection cost equally out for ensuring GSC stable operation. (3) Exploring collaboration among GSC members using complex operation research and artificial intelligence will be international research frontier. Relevant papers are to provide Chinese research with merely innovation in methodology. Besides, the "government-enterprise-university-research institute-customer-economy" management mode proposed by development countries like China will enrich the international GSC research scope, leading international GSC knowledge structure to change. The contribution of this study is to afford reference for future research on GSC.