Mapping operations research in project management: a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Successful project management can help organisations in reducing costs and increasing its efficiency. Likewise, operations research has contributed significantly to improve project management performance with phase-project-planning methodologies. However, as far as we know, there is no literature review that compiles operations research in project management (OR+PM). Thus, this paper aims to present a bibliometric analysis of OR+PM using 1,254 research papers retrieved from ISI Web of Science. This final dataset is composed of articles from scientific journals published between 2001-2018. The results indicate that project scheduling, project management and resource-constrained project scheduling have been the backbone concepts of OR+PM; while terms, such as sustainability, earned value management, multi-objective optimisation, and multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem have been gaining relevance in recent years. Results also show who have been the most influential authors, institutions and countries in the development of this field. Finally, future research opportunities for OR+PM are identified.