Bibliographic Analysis of Operations Research Citation in the Environmental Domain

This article uses bibliographic analysis techniques to examine the papers in the Web of Science database that have citation links to key operations research/management science (OR/MS) journals. The research identified the journals and papers in the environmental domains which cite these OR/MS journals and identify the key journals, papers, and themes. This research shows that environmental disciplines are becoming more important relative to the business and engineering domains that predominated in the previous years. However, much of the citation of OR/MS journals is for techniques like data envelopment analysis (DEA) which are used to conduct research rather than directly model environmental problems. Of the modelling techniques used to address problems in the environmental domains, MCDM methods are the most often cited, reflecting the importance of MCDM with the decision support systems (DSS) field. There are also significant numbers of applications relating to logistics and energy which cite OR/MS papers. Further research is needed to clarify the role of OR/MS techniques in the environmental sector, a domain outside the traditional areas of OR/MS application.