Quality and Operations Management in Food Supply Chains

Journal Statistics

The number of publications in different time periods is presented in Figure 1 to show the evolution of research interest in this topic. Between 2005 and 2017, there were a total of 105 articles on the operations management related to food quality in food supply chains. The number of the articles is rather limited before the year 2008. Then the number rises slowly from 2008 to 2012. Since 2012, scholars have become more interested in this topic. The statistics show that while the total number of research in this area is still small, interest in this field has grown rapidly in recent years.

Figure 1 Distribution of articles over time.

Figure 2 presents the distribution of articles in these major publication outlets. The 105 articles included in this study were published in more than 30 journals on operations management or food quality. Apparently, the top journals are International Journal of Production Economics (IJPE), Production and Operations Management (POM), International Journal of Production Research (IJPR), and Omega, which account for about one-third of the total amount. The first half of the papers contributes to about 80 percent of the total papers. After carefully reading the 105 articles, we found that these papers represent an appropriate overview of the current state-of-the-art research in the area of operations management and food quality control in food supply chains.

Figure 2 Distribution of journals (with number of articles ≥ 2).