Sustainable Public Procurement: a Bibliometric Survey

Abstract

Purpose: This article aims to present the scientific production inherent to the subject of sustainable public procurement from documents surveyed in the Web of Science (WoS) database.
 
 Theoretical framework: the work was based on understanding how the public procurement theme is correlated with sustainability and how, in quantitative levels, the scientific production addresses this issue.
 
 Method/design/approach: The research was exploratory with a qualitative approach in which a structured mapping was performed, by means of the bibliometric method, on the scientific articles in WoS in the last five years.
 
 Results and conclusion: as a result of the research, it was analyzed that the authors with the highest production on the subject are not necessarily the most cited, with only one occurrence. Other results were a great diversity of theories/models used by the selected authors. And they were obtained with the help of the R Program - Bibliometrix.
 
 Research implications: the research makes explicit, through its results, both the relevance of the authors and the scientific production that these researchers are producing on sustainable public procurement. Another implication is the survey of the theories used for the studies on the theme.
 
 Originality/value: as this is an unprecedented study, the research sought to present to the scientific community the importance of what is currently being produced on the subject of sustainable public procurement, providing managers and researchers with the most current sources and main authors on the subject.