Total Quality Management & Business Excellence: a 33-year overview using bibliometric and content analysis

Abstract

As a prestigious and unique journal on total quality management (TQM), Total Quality Management & Business Excellence (TQM&BE) has significantly contributed to theoretical and practical advancement. Retrieving 2588 literature from Scopus between 1990 and 2022, this paper applies CiteSpace and VOSviewer to analyze the publications per year and by geographic distribution, productive authors, highly cited literature, and related journals. Through combining content analysis, research content and hotspots of eight key themes are summarized. Additionally, this paper compares TQM&BE with seven journals on quality management, and predicts development potential of impact factor and quartile by ARIMA method. The results show the following: (1) With the growth in publications, TQM&BE has been gaining approval from numerous countries worldwide, especially in universities in China, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Sweden. (2) TQM&BE publishes many highly cited classics in areas such as frameworks of TQM, customer satisfaction, and improvement of quality innovation approaches, effectively expanding accumulation of achievements. (3) Sustainable quality management, excellence 4.0, role of e-service quality in customer loyalty, and upgradation of Kano model are its recent hotspots. (4) TQM&BE is projected to maintain high-speed growth in impact factor, while its academic authority will increasingly surpass other journals on quality management.