Technological intelligence for circular supply chain: a co-citation analysis approach

Abstract

Purpose The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the supply chains, and this brought researchers and practitioners to think about more on circular supply chains (CSC). The CSC concept has been discussed in the literature more than a decade. This study aims to find out the theoretical roots of CSC by analyzing scholarly articles in literature. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses document cocitation analysis for reaching this aim. After retrieving data from Web of Science database, this paper explores data set by considering used references of these publications and clusters them based on their title terms and visualizes them by using cosine similarity index. Findings This paper concludes that CSC is mainly discussed along with sustainability, sustainable supply chains and green supply chains, where the focus is integrating circular economy principles to supply chain management (SCM). On the other hand, although resiliency is an essential characteristic of SCM, contribution of CSC to supply chain resilience is neglected in the literature. Research limitations/implications CSC will gain importance in near future to increase national/firm productivity, and findings of this paper will give researchers insights for furthering their studies. Social implications To avoid supply chain and market collapse caused by natural disruptions, supply chain resilience is of paramount importance. According to the findings of this paper, the authors believe that business resilience in COVID-19-restricted environment may have exit point by using circular perspective. Originality/value The importance of CSC has increased due to the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, this unique study was undertaken to investigate the evolution of this crucial topic with evidence from the literature through a cocitation analysis.