A Review of Research in the Quality Management Journal: Influential Resources, Key Themes, and Emerging Trends

Abstract

The Quality Management Journal (QMJ) was established in 1993 to stimulate dialogue between academics studying quality and business leaders actively working to improve it, when the literature on quality management contained primarily empirical studies with a narrow focus and lack of rigor. QMJ was conceived to fill this gap, and to serve as a forum for rigorous, original research, while maintaining a strong balance between the development of theory and its application to solving practical problems in a variety of domains. Now that the QMJ has been active for nearly two decades, the time is particularly appropriate for a data-driven reflection on what has transpired in the field of quality management through the lens of work published in this journal.Using various analytical techniques including a literature review of literature reviews, network analysis, text mining, association analysis, and cluster analysis, this paper identifies: 1) the themes in quality management research explored by the QMJ since its inception; 2) the most influential resources that researchers have leveraged to draw their conclusions (which includes articles in academic and practitioner journals as well as books); and 3) emerging patterns and trends in the direction of research published in the QMJ. Key results are synthesized to make observations about the evolution of quality management research in the QMJ, and to identify gaps and emerging trends in the literature to drive future research agendas. Unlike previous published reviews of quality management research, this one is unique in that it focuses on the progress of research captured specifically by the QMJ.