Collaboration Patterns and Topic Trends in Business Process Management Conferences

Abstract

One of the most important scientific activities in which business process management (BPM) research attempts have been presented is the BPM Conferences that have been organized since 2003. These conferences guide the future of the field concerning different aspects of the subject. This study focuses on the accumulated literature that BPM conferences have constituted. In this regard, it aims to investigate the portfolio of BPM conferences to pinpoint the trends that have been followed over the years. A bibliometric dataset of the proceedings between 2005 and 2020 was extracted. The methods of scientometrics and bibliometrics are adopted to reveal the collaborations and clusters regarding citations, co-authorships, co-occurrences of keywords, and topic structures, the trends, and summary statistics. Clusters have emerged around certain authors and these authors are pioneering researchers who direct international studies on BPM and have created many research and development opportunities with their research laboratories. The situation in author relations is also reflected in the statistics of institutions and countries. With the keyword and abstract analyses at different depths and dimensions, inferences were made about the topics discussed at the BPM Conferences. Co-authorship analyses regarding authors and countries revealed the clusters around the authors and their countries such as Van der Aalst (Netherlands), Mendling (Austria), Weske (Germany), Dumas (Estonia), La Rossa (Australia), and Reijers (Netherlands). It has been observed that the keywords that have been recorded intensively in the last five years are concentrated around the topics of industry 4.0, big data, internet of things, blockchain, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. In general terms, it has been observed that especially the topics such as process mining, semantic structures of processes, business process execution language, and related projects have come to the fore. Findings emphasize that these topics have been affected by the business and technology dynamics of the relevant period.