A systematic literature review of RFID in supply chain management

What is it about?

The use of RFID technologies has benefited supply chain management by reducing inventory losses, enhancing information accuracy, reducing process cycle times, and improving overall efficiency. RFID systems in a supply chain can be utilized for multiple purposes including tagging, machine readers, monitoring and controlling methods. Many researchers have reviewed RFID literature in relation to supply chain management. These reviews are often conducted in the traditional manner where the author(s) select paper based on their area of expertise, interest and experience. Such reviews may not select the most representative papers and not be equipped to find the important research trends in the domain. Therefore, this study fills a research gap by conducting a systematic literature review (SLR) of RFID in supply chains, which to the best our knowledge has not been carried out before. An SLR employs an algorithm to select papers from standard databases. The systematic literature review using a bibliometric and network analysis enables unveiling the key features of the contemporary literature. We have analyzed 556 documents published from 2001 through 2020. Using contemporary tools from bibliometric analysis we presented an exploratory analysis which reveals influential authors, sources, region, among other key aspects. This is followed by a network analysis to understand conceptual structure of the literature along various dimensions keywords, authors, and publication sources. Conceptual structure was depicted through various visualization tools in the form of clusters. Dynamic co-citation analysis is a unique feature of the paper. In addition, we presented a detailed multivariate analysis of the most influential works published based on a co-citation (similarity) matrix. The multivariate analysis used k-means clustering to identify optimal number of clusters. The analysis was further supported by factor analysis. The findings of this paper throw light on the focused research areas within RFID in supply chain which serves as an effective guideline for future studies in this area.

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