Bibliometric Analysis of Published Literature on the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain

Abstract

The pharmaceutical supply chain is important for timely availability of medicines to the patients in need. It is a complex system involving a number of stakeholders. It is important to understand the shift in trend in this field. This study aims to evaluate the current knowledge structure of pharmaceutical supply chain with the help of bibliometric analysis. Metadata of 1929 publications were extracted Scopus database and analyzed in MS Excel version 2016 and VOS Viewer. Analysis of citations was done based on yearly citation matrix. Bibliometric analysis was done for co-citation based on cited authors, citations analysis based on documents, bibliographic coupling based on country, co-occurrence based on all keywords, and term co-occurrence based on text data. It was found that 21% of the publications were from the United States. The terms data, medicine, model, risk, performance, impact, framework, uncertainty, blockchain have been used more often in the recent publications.