The intellectual structure of social and sustainable public procurement research

Public procurement has recently taken into account social and sustainable factors, increasing academic literature in this field. The aim of this paper is to map the intellectual structure of social and sustainable public procurement research by means of delimiting the scientific domain's resear...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Torres-Pruñonosa, Jose|||0000-0003-2276-1655, Plaza-Navas, Miquel Àngel|||0000-0001-6807-0185, Díez Martín, Francisco de Asís|||0000-0002-9888-833X, Beltrán Cangrós, Albert
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2021
País:España
Institución:Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Repositorio:Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:ddd.uab.cat:308403
Acceso en línea:https://ddd.uab.cat/record/308403
https://dx.doi.org/urn:doi:10.3390/su13020774
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Public procurement
Sustainability
Social value
Ethics
Environment
Intellectual structure
Bibliometric
Trends
Co-citation
Descripción
Sumario:Public procurement has recently taken into account social and sustainable factors, increasing academic literature in this field. The aim of this paper is to map the intellectual structure of social and sustainable public procurement research by means of delimiting the scientific domain's research traditions, its disciplinary composition, and influential research topics. Given that there is a literature gap in bibliometric studies applied to this field, we conducted a co-citation analysis to identify the intellectual structure of this area of knowledge. Co-citation analyses identify networks of interconnections and, consequently, detect the most (and the least) active research areas, being a good complement to traditional literature reviews. This article contributes to science development because it is the first paper to carry out a bibliometric analysis in the field of social and sustainable public procurement, as well as the first one to conduct a co-citation analysis among public procurement research. Consequently, it is also the first article to detect which papers have become burst in this research field. The results show twelve different clusters of publications that were cited by researchers who wrote papers on social and sustainable public procurement. In other words, the sources of knowledge that scholars used as references are analysed, identifying papers that can be considered turning points, as well as those that became specially cited over a discrete period of time. Six different research trends were identified over the last decade in regard to social and sustainable public procurement research. The conclusions highlight the relevance of the findings, especially because they provide guidance to researchers when conducting literature reviews, given that the most significant journals and papers are identified.