Cold Chain Management: Descriptive Bibliometric Analysis

XL ENCONTRO NACIONAL DE ENGENHARIA DE PRODUÇÃO “Contribuições da Engenharia de Produção para a Gestão de Operações Energéticas Sustentáveis” Foz do Iguaçu, Paraná, Brasil, 20 a 23 de outubro de 2020.

Paulo Henrique Amorim Santos (Universidade Federal de São Carlos) [email protected]

Roberto Antonio Martins (Universidade Federal de São Carlos) [email protected]

Cold chains are part of the food, pharmaceutical, and chemical sectors. The cold chain management has been attracting a lot of attention among practitioners and scholars. Cold chain managers must guarantee an effective logistic system, that not only delivers products safely, but also preserves quality, reaches the destination on time, and operates cost- effectively. This article aims to present the results of a descriptive bibliometric analysis on cold chain management. The sample records extracted from Scopus database were processed using the Bibliometrix, an R package, and ran in the RStudio environment. The main results show that two different sectors - food engineering/agribusiness and health – address the domain. Despite there being few authors of high productivity in the field, scientific production has increased in recent years. Most of the influential sources publish on health sciences, agricultural and food engineering, and applied social sciences, gaining more notoriety since 2012. Indeed, cold chain has been attracting more attention from operations management researchers. Cold chain has been evolving from quality control approach by gaining a stronger link with managerial scope. Finally, the applicability of industry 4.0 technologies like “internet of things”, “wireless sensor network” and “rfid” have been gaining notoriety in the field.

Keywords: Cold Chain Management, Supply Chain Management, Cold Chain Logistics, Industry 4.0, Bibliometry.

1. Introduction Logistics management has become an important strategic process for companies to increase their total revenue, considering rising production costs and fierce competition. In the corporate sector, supply chains are complex autonomous and interdependent systems, composed of companies and business units (CHAN, 2011). Therefore, supply chain management is an integration function, with the primary responsibility of linking the main business functions and business processes within and between companies in a cohesive and high-performance business model (MAJEED; RUPASINGHE 2017). The supply chain success does not come from the aggregation of individual operations performance but from the collective and integrated activities, as well as the relations between companies (BOURNE et al. 2017). Thus, the facilities monitoring and control of the associated factories and the operational performance have become essential for effective management and improved productivity (HWANG et al. 2017). The relevance of cold chain management has been rising in recent decades. Most of the interest is on the use of equipment and information technology to provide customers with refrigeration during storage, transportation, distribution, packaging, and product processing (SUN et al. 2019). Cold chains operate on high demand supply chains and are common in the food (refrigerated and frozen), pharmaceutical and in some shipments of chemical products (CHEN; SHAW, 2011; ZHENG 2015). Unlike traditional supply chain management, goods in cold chains generally have a short shelf life and great sensitivity to the surrounding environment. When handling sensitive goods in an environment with a low temperature, the potential risks require strict monitoring because they can directly damage product quality and operational efficiency (TSANG et al. 2018). The cold chain, therefore, must provide an efficient logistical system, which not only delivers products safely but which also preserves its quality, reaches its destination in time and operates cost-effectively. Managers need to ensure that the cold chain is effective as well as its essential components (fast freezers, cold stores, refrigerated trucks, refrigerated displays, etc.) are in good working order (CHEN; SHAW, 2011). The cold chain difficulties are packaging, storing, and transportation, besides the high asset specificity and market uncertainty. Changing consumer preferences and the rise of e-commerce, as a channel for purchasing a wide variety of food products, also pose new challenges. Cold chain management plays a central role to overcome those difficulties, implementing modern information technologies to ensure the safety of product quality monitoring and its real-time tracking (ZHENG, 2015). Technologies like radio frequency identification (RFID) have been gaining renewed importance with the advancement of the digitalization proposed by industry 1

4.0 (SUN et al. 2019). Those technological innovations allow digital and physical entities to be linked creating new applications, services, and possibilities in information management. The cold chain management rise represents the birth of modern and specialized logistics (SUN et al. 2019). Its importance has grown among practitioners and academics, mainly due to stricter consumer expectations, government regulations, and fierce competition in the market (SHIH; WANG, 2016; SHASHI et al. 2017). However, the link between management and the cold chain remains little explored in the literature. The following research questions guide the investigation on how the literature has been addressing cold chain management : RQ1: What is the current description of the domain of cold chain management? RQ2: What are the trends in the field of cold chain management? Therefore, the objective of this article is to map the field production, impact, and current trends using descriptive bibliometric analysis.

2. Research Design The bibliometric analysis developed follows the steps : (1) definition of the study: definition of the objective, choice of the database and definition of the filters to be applied to delimit the sample; (2) data collection and treatment: selection, capture and treatment of data after applying the filters defined in the previous step; (3) data analysis: use of software for bibliometric and statistical analysis; and (4) interpretation: interpretation and dissemination of results (ZUPIC; CATER, 2015). The database Scopus was used due to its coverage. The following principles have been applied to ensure consistency in the eligibility of documents:  Only articles and reviews published in journals with a peer-review process;  No time-span filter. The following search string was used in the Scopus database in the title, abstract and keywords fields: "COLD CHAIN" AND ("SUPPLY CHAIN" OR "LOGISTIC *"). The * symbol means that the suffix may vary, which is why this feature was used to cover derivations of the term "LOGISTIC" and increase the return on documents. The sample records were processed using the Bibliometrix package, version 3.0.0, running in the RStudio integrated development environment, version 1.2.5042. Indeed, the creation of the graphs was assisted by Excel spreadsheets and the R package "ggplot2", version 3.2.0. More

details about Bibliometrix and ggplot2 are available in Aria and Cuccurullo (2017) and Wickham (2016), respectively.

3. Descriptive Bibliometric Analysis The descriptive bibliometrics allows the cold chain management field to identify the main authors, journals, and publications; authors' affiliation, and authors' keywords. The search resulted in a total of 557 documents (505 are articles and 52 reviews), published in 310 outlets, from 1983 to 2020. Figure 1 illustrates the scientific production and impact (citations) in the field. Note that the annual scientific production (blue) has increased since 1993, and the most impressive production backs from 2005. Higher production occurs in 2019 (95 articles) and the curve characteristics shows the theme has been gaining relevance in the academia. Regarding the impact (red line), a high impact occured in 2008 (5.2) and 2009 (5.0). Moreover, articles from 2010 (3.1), 2012 (2.8), and 2014 (2.5) also show a significant impact. Naturally, the curve has declined in recent years.

Figure 1 - Annual scientific production and production impact on the average citation of articles per year

100 6 90 80 5 70 4 60 50 3 40

30 2 PublishedArticles 20 1

10 Avarage Citations per Year 0 0 1983 1986 1989 1992 1995 1998 2001 2004 2007 2010 2013 2016 2019

Articles (Production Mean Citations per Year (Impact)

Source: The authors (2020)

Figure 2 offers another perspective on the field's maturity. According to Lotka's Law, the sample studied has a higher frequency than expected for "occasional" authors, i.e., those who have published only one article. This result shows that there are few high productivity authors in the field. Such characteristic affects the field maturity negatively due to authors longevity.

On the other hand, Figure 2 unfolds that recently a group of authors could change such expected behavior.

Figure 2 - Lotka's Law

Source: The authors (2020)

Figure 3 ilustrates this group of authors regarding their scientific production and impact of the cold chain management domain. The bubbles size represents the number of articles published in the year and the color intensity is proportional to the total number of citations per year. Zhang X (33 articles since 2009) shows higher productivity in the years 2016 and 2017. Zhang X cold chain scientific production focus on thermal performance analysis in a value-based management perspective. Fu Z (traceability and wireless monitoring), Zhang Y (wireless monitoring and vehicle routing), and Wang Y (vehicle routing and risk management) also present significant contribution and production longevity (14 articles each since 2009). It is worthy of note the rising interest of several authors on the topic since 2012, which confirms the increase in the scientific production in recent years (Figure 1).

Figure 3 – Most relevant authors' scientific production and impact

Source: The authors (2020)

Table 1 presents the documents with the most significant impact in terms of total citations and total citations per year of publication. Abad et al. (2009) is the most cited article earning 293 citations and also has the highest citations per year (24.42), followed by Jedermann et al. (2009), with 145 citations and 12.08 citations per year. Both works deal with the use of RFID technology in the cold food chain, the former focusing on traceability and the second on temperature profiling. Amorij et al. (2008) focuses on the health sector and deals with the stability of the influenza vaccine. Among the 10 articles with the highest total number of citations, 8 are from the 2008-2010 period, which reinforces the previous results (Figure 1) regarding the impact of that time period. Chianella et al. (2013) has the second-highest number of citations per year (14.75), followed by Aung and Chang (2014), Jedermann et al. (2009), and Jedermann et al. (2014). Although those papers were published recently, they caused a relevant impact. Indeed, no authors of higher impact documents are among the most productive authors. Moreover, Table 2 complements the previous information by presenting local citations, i.e., those citations received from the sample documents. It is worthy of note that Montanari (2008) impact on sample authors. The author offers one of the pioneer documents to approach the cold chain with a managerial perspective. Following, Abad et al. (2009), Kuo and Chen (2010), and Aung and Chang (2014) focus on the food sector and earned many citations from the sample authors. Abad et al. (2009) develops a RFID smart tag for real-time traceability and cold chain monitoring for food applications. Kuo and Chen (2010) develop an advanced Multi- Temperature Joint Distribution System for the food cold chain. Aung and Chang (2014)

formulate a quality assurance system based on temperature management and wireless sensors. Most of the authors from Table 2 are also present on Table 1. From Table 2, only the authors Xinqing Xiao and Zetian Fu (from Xiao et al., 2016) appear among the most productive (Figure 3). In their work, the authors apply Compressed Sending and Wireless Sensor Network methods for improving efficiency of a frozen and chilled aquatic products monitoring system.

Table 1 - Most cited articles Total TC per Ranking TC Paper Citations Year per Year ABAD E, 2009, J FOOD ENG 293 24,42 1 JEDERMANN R, 2009, COMPUT ELECTRON AGRIC 145 12,08 4 AMORIJ JP, 2008, PHARM RES 126 9,69 9 CHIANELLA I, 2013, ANAL CHEM 118 14,75 2 RUIZ-GARCIA L, 2008, J FOOD ENG 117 9,00 12 CAI X, 2010, PROD OPER MANAGE 110 10,00 7 HALLDRSSON, 2010, INT J PHYS DISTRIB LOGIST MANAGE 109 9,91 8 MARTNEZ-SALA AS, 2009, COMPUT IND 99 8,25 14 KUO JC, 2010, FOOD CONTROL 96 8,73 13 ZANONI S, 2012, INT J PROD ECON 92 10,22 6 MONTANARI R, 2008, TRENDS FOOD SCI TECHNOL 92 7,08 15 AUNG MM, 2014, FOOD CONTROL 85 12,14 3 VRDOLJAK A, 2012, J CONTROL RELEASE 85 9,44 10 JEDERMANN R, 2014, PHIL TRANS R SOC 80 11,43 5 ZAFFRAN M, 2013, VACCINE 75 9,38 11 Source: The authors (2020)

Table 2 - Most cited articles (within the sample) Local Global % Paper Year Citations Citations Local/Total MONTANARI R, 2008, TRENDS FOOD SCI TECHNOL 2008 36 92 39% ABAD E, 2009, J FOOD ENG 2009 29 293 10% KUO JC, 2010, FOOD CONTROL 2010 27 96 28% AUNG MM, 2014, FOOD CONTROL 2014 19 85 22% JEDERMANN R, 2009, COMPUT ELECTRON AGRIC 2009 16 145 11% SALIN V, 2003, INT J PHYS DISTRIB LOGIST MANAGE 2003 14 40 35% RUIZ-GARCIA L, 2008, J FOOD ENG 2008 14 117 12% GOGOU E, 2015, INT J REFRIG 2015 12 33 36% LAGUERRE O, 2013, TRENDS FOOD SCI TECHNOL 2013 11 55 20% JEDERMANN R, 2014, PHILOS TRANS R SOC 2014 11 80 14% XIAO X, 2016, FOOD CONTROL 2016 11 35 31% Source: The authors (2020) 6

Table 3 shows the leading journals of the sample based on the quantity of articles, the total number of citations, and the h index of published articles. All outlets have started publishing articles in this decade, except for Vaccine that plays a vital role in the field regarding the number of published papers and total citations. The Vaccine publishes mainly papers on the health sector. Following, the majority of journals publish papers on food engineering and agribusiness.

Table 3 - Main journals of the field First Publication Total H Sources Articles Year Citation index VACCINE 40 1989 636 16 FOOD CONTROL 15 2010 394 10 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CHINESE SOCIETY OF 13 2010 68 5 AGRICULTURAL ENGINEERING TRANSACTIONS OF THE CHINESE SOCIETY FOR 11 2013 42 5 AGRICULTURAL MACHINERY SUSTAINABILITY (SWITZERLAND) 10 2017 85 4 ADVANCE JOURNAL OF FOOD SCIENCE AND 7 2013 14 2 TECHNOLOGY INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF LOGISTICS 6 2018 41 3 MANAGEMENT JOURNAL OF FOOD ENGINEERING 6 2008 439 5 MODERN FOOD SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 6 2014 6 1 PLOS ONE 6 2013 67 4 REVISTA DE LA FACULTAD DE AGRONOMIA 6 2019 0 0 Source: The authors (2020)

Figure 4 complements the previous table, offering a dynamic perspective of outlets. The abbreviations in square brackets identify the journal's scope: health [H]; biological sciences [BS]; agricultural and food sciences [AFS]; mechanical engineering [ME]; industrial engineering [IE]; business, management and accounting [BMA]; social sciences [SS]; and environmental sciences [ES]. The results show that the Vaccine is a pioneer and have constantly been publishing since 2006. Together with Plos One, which starts productivity in 2013, the two journals represent a substantial segment of cold chain management: the health sector. The outlets with a focus on the agricultural and food sector have gained more notoriety since 2012. The International Journal of Logistics Management, Sustainability, and Adv. Journal of Food Science and Technology have greater dominance on the domain, in recent years, which indicates strengthening on the managerial approach.

Figure 4 – Journals dynamics

Source: The authors (2020)

Figure 5 presents the treemap of the 45 most cited authors' keywords. The terms on the left pose high frequency. However, as they are closely related to the search terms, they are like field proxies. The middle of the graph split the keywords in two groups, the food/agribusiness sector and the health sector. The word "management" appears together with "supply chain" and "cold chain", which an indication of a significant portion of the articles dealts with cold chain under the managerial perspective. Finally, the keywords associated with technologies like "internet of things"", "wireless sensor network" and "rfid" stands out. It is worthy to notice that "quality", "food quality" and "quality control" are more associated with product quality than quality management. On the right, terms related to the food industry predominate.

Figure 5 – Most frequently cited authors' keywords

Source: The authors (2020)

To further analyze trending topics, Figure 6 shows the dynamics of the 12 main keywords of the sample. The results point out to changes on the use of those commonly used keywords. "Logistics" and "Supply Chain" have been losing strength compared to "Cold Chain" and "Cold Chain Logistics". On the other hand, "Wireless Sensor Network" posed less relevance than "Internet of Things" as a consequence of Industry 4.0 technologies become more important. "Supply Chain Management" and "Cold Chain Management" have been more used with the evolution of the managerial approach, which confirms a trend identified in Figure 4. Keywords related to the health sector are more dispersed.

Figure 6 – Authors' keyword growth

Source: The authors (2020)

Figure 7 presents the geographical distribution of scientific production. The most productive countries are China (383), and the USA (224). India (72) also shows a high number of publications. Most European countries also collaborate with the sample. African countries like South Africa (22), Ethiopia (20), Kenya (18), and Guinea (11) also present significant production.

Figure 7 - Country scientific production

Source: The authors (2020)

4. Final Remarks This paper provides a step towards closing the gap in the literature by describing the cold chain management research field's domain and trends through a bibliometric study. A first contribution to describe the domain (RQ1) is the identification of the themes addressed by scholars from two different sectors - food engineering/agribusiness and health. Those clusters arose from the analysis of both the leading journals (Table 3) and in the most frequent authors' keywords (Figure 5). Second, there are few authors of high productivity in the field (Figure 2), a cause for an increase in production in recent years (Figure 1). However, the most significant impact (most citations) comes from a different set of authors whose papers range from 2008- 2010 (Figure 1 and Tables 1 and 2). The finding shows that the field has not hit the maturity level expected by Lotka's law, and the topic is addressed mostly by occasional authors (Figures 2 and 3). Third, most of the influential outlets publish papers on health and food engineering/agribusiness (Table 3). Indeed, several research trends were identified in the study (RQ2). The first is a change on the use of commonly used keywords that play a role of the domain themes. "Supply Chain Management" and "Cold Chain Management" are terms on the rise and "Cold Chain Logistics" has been the leading term used to describe the field (Figure 6). Moreover, the keywords associated with Industry 4.0 technologies like "internet of things", “wireless sensor network” and “rfid” has been gaining notoriety (Figure 5 and Figure 6). Most impactful journals have

gained notoriety since 2012 and are associated with health sciences, agricultural and food sciences, and applied social sciences (Figure 4). Finally, it is evident that with the maturation of the research area, the cold chain has been gaining more considerable attention from operations management. The cold chain has been evolving from the quality control approach by gaining a stronger link with managerial scope (Figure 4, 5, and 6). Deepening of bibliometric analysis with the application of social network analysis and content analysis of documents seems to be a natural step to understand scientific production about this emerging field better.

5. Acknowledgments The authors acknowledge the financial support by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Financing Code 001.

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