A Scientometrics Review on City Logistics Literature: Research Trends, Advanced Theory and Practice

Abstract

The contradiction between the contribution of city logistics (CL) to sustainable urban development and its negative externalities is increasingly prominent. Policy supervision measures and the green logistics initiative are also in conflict with the management goal of logistics enterprises. Innovative solutions for CL have attracted increasing research attention worldwide. However, the description of the global research network in the field of CL, research trends, and the discussion of advanced theories and practices have not been systematically reviewed so far. Especially in the past three years, there has been an explosive growth of relevant literature. In this paper, the method of combining scientometric analysis and thematic discussion was adopted to systematically review 513 important works in the literature from 1993 to 2018, aiming to provide a holistic understanding of the status in quo, trends and gaps of CL research, and to further analyze prominent problems. The study has made statistical analyses of the publication year profile, journal allocation and research methods of the included literature, and constructed four kinds of visualized bibliographic information timeline maps for the authorship network, international collaboration network, keywords co-occurrence network and research topic clustering. Then, the three themes summarized by clustering are discussed, mainly focusing on CL strategies and policy, green supply chain management, planning methods, and advanced concepts and practices. Finally, the research gaps framework and agenda were reported. This study contributes to summarizing the research and development of city logistics on the whole, and can also serve as an explorative manual to support sustainable urban freight activities and innovative research.

Importance of the Stakeholders’ Interaction: Comparative, Longitudinal Study of Two City Logistics Initiatives

“…As many different stakeholders with different motives and goals were involved, it proved important to frame the initiatives' objectives in consultation with those that are concerned and to collaborate with them throughout the whole implementation process. However, the analysis revealed instances that relevant stakeholders were not engaged to sufficient degrees, supporting the findings of [40,41]. This lack of engagement created difficulties in some crucial stages of the implementation process.…”

A Systematic Literature Review of Green and Sustainable Logistics: Bibliometric Analysis, Research Trend and Knowledge Taxonomy

“…Science mapping is a quantitative analysis approach that uses mathematical statistics and visualization techniques to study bibliographic networks (e.g., academics, institutions, themes, keywords, and journals) in a specific field [28]. This approach has been widely applied in many academic fields, such as sustainable transportation [29], environment science [30], city logistics [31] and waste management [32] and can directly synthesize salient findings from the existing knowledge system. Figure 1 illustrates the detailed research process, consisting of three steps.…”

“…The metric, total link strength (TLS), is outputted automatically by the software to reflect the correlation degree between any two nodes in the generated networks. A higher value of TLS, the higher importance and centrality of the item has [31]. Nodes with a high similarity were clustered together and distinguished by colors with other clusters, while the nodes with low similarity should be separated as far as possible.…”

“…For a detailed operation manual of bibliographical experiments using science mapping approach, readers are advised to refer Jin et al [28] and Hu et al [31].…”

“…The keywords co-occurrence analysis was conducted to describe the internal composition and structure of G&SL and to reveal the frontiers [31]. The options "All Keywords" and "Full Counting" in VOSviewer analysis were checked to obtain a holistic intellectual landscape of G&SL research.…”