Articulo Revista Indexada
The Intellectual Structure of Social and Sustainable Public Procurement Research: A Co-Citation Analysis
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Autor
Torres-Pruñonosa, Jose (1)
Plaza-Navas, Miquel Angel
Díez-Martín, Francisco
Beltran-Cangrós, Albert
Institución
Resumen
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.