Towards supply chain resilience with additive manufacturing: A bibliometric survey

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) is an evolutionary manufacturing technology attracting many firms and governments. Its impact, however, on supply chains remains unexplored. To date, no research has investigated the implications of additive manufacturing on Supply Chain (SC) resilience utilizing a bibliometric analysis. This study presents a bibliometric analysis to investigate the scientific development and contribution of additive manufacturing to supply chain resilience. The investigation is conducted to unveil and characterize the ongoing and future research trends of AM in SC and its intersection in the literature. After pre-processing, two hundred and twenty-four articles are extracted from the Web of Science database utilizing relevant keywords and logical connections, the metadata collected from these articles are investigated and compared using bibliographic coupling, sources analysis, co-citation and co-word analysis through the Bibliometrix R software and VOSViewer. The bibliometric survey aims to classify the most pertinent thematic collections and publications in which AM and SC intersect. We show a noticeable focus on adopting AM to respond to SC disruptions and SC management in recent years. Insights and trends regarding AM & SC for practitioners and scholars are identified and proposed for future research directions.