The Intellectual Structure of Social and Sustainable Public Procurement Research: A Co-Citation Analysis

Jose Torres-Pruñonosa, Miquel Angel Plaza-Navas, Francisco Díez-Martín and Albert Beltran-Cangrós
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Jose Torres-Pruñonosa: Facultad de Empresa y Comunicación, Universidad Internacional de la Rioja (UNIR), 26006 Logroño, La Rioja, Spain
Miquel Angel Plaza-Navas: Institución Milá y Fontanals de Investigación en Humanidades, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), 08001 Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
Francisco Díez-Martín: Department of Business Economics, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, 28933 Móstoles, Madrid, Spain
Albert Beltran-Cangrós: Escuela de Turismo y Dirección Hotelera (EUTDH), Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, 08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 2, 1-33

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: public procurement; sustainability; social value; ethics; environment; intellectual structure; bibliometric; trends; co-citation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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