Research fronts in data envelopment analysis

John S. Liu, Louis Y.Y. Lu and Wen-Min Lu

Omega, 2016, vol. 58, issue C, 33-45

Abstract: Research activities relating to data envelopment analysis (DEA) have grown at a fast rate recently. Exactly what activities have been carrying the research momentum forward is a question of particular interest to the research community. The purpose of this study is to find these research activities, or research fronts, in DEA. A research front refers to a coherent topic or issue addressed by a group of research articles in recent years. The large amount of DEA literature makes it difficult to use any traditional qualitative methodology to sort out the matter. Thus, this study applies a network clustering method to group the literature through a citation network established from the DEA literature over the period 2000 to 2014. The keywords of the articles in each discovered group help pinpoint its research focus. The four research fronts identified are “bootstrapping and two-stage analysis”, “undesirable factors”, “cross-efficiency and ranking”, and “network DEA, dynamic DEA, and SBM”. Each research front is then examined with key-route main path analysis to uncover the elements in its core. In addition to presenting the research fronts, this study also updates the main paths and author statistics of DEA development since its inception and compares them with those reported in a previous study.

Keywords: Data envelopment analysis; Research front; Literature survey; Main path analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (80)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305048315000778
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jomega:v:58:y:2016:i:c:p:33-45

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
https://shop.elsevie ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.omega.2015.04.004

Access Statistics for this article

Omega is currently edited by B. Lev

More articles in Omega from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().