Emerging themes and future research directions in the cold supply chain: a bibliometric and co-citation analysis

PurposeThe primary goal of this review is to identify emerging themes in the cold supply chain (CSC) and their future research directions, methodologies, and theories.Design/methodology/approachThe review looks at CSC related articles from Scopus database published in the years 2000–2020. Thereafter, bibliometric and co-citation analyses have been conducted to identify emerging themes, methodologies, and theoretical perspectives related to CSC management.FindingsThis study revealed a clear research gap in CSC literature with emerging themes relevant to diverse aspects. Primarily, the most prominent authors, methodologies, and theories were identified from bibliometric analysis. Next, we generated clusters to identify the insights of each cluster using co-citation analysis. Consequently, the significance of clusters concerning the number of articles, theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and themes was recognized. Finally, a few future research questions regarding emerging themes have been identified.Practical implicationsThe importance of co-citation and bibliometric analyses in studying the evolution of research over a definite time is emphasized in this work. As per emerging themes, implementing digital technologies has increased the efficiency of traditional CSC and transformed it into digital CSC.Originality/valueAs per the authors' knowledge, this work is the first in literature to explore the significance of identifying emerging areas and future research directions in managing CSC through literature review based on bibliometric and co-citation analysis.