Structure of the lean literature: Journal quality analysis

Over the last three decades, the topic of ‘Lean’ (Womack and Jones, 1996) has become firmly established within the field of logistics and supply chain research. This conference paper builds upon the work presented at ISL’16 (Francis et al., 2016), and represents the second stage of a programme of bibliographic research into the topic of Lean. The first stage of the programme was a Citation Analysis (CA). This identified the 241 most influential publications on the topic of lean, as measured by citation; the dominant academic approach for providing insight into the significance of individual publications (Peng and Zhou, 2006; Aguinis et al., 2014). Borrowing terminology from Pilkington and Meredith’s (2009) bibliometric analysis of the operations management field, our conference paper will provide insight into the intellectual structure of the set of (most influential) lean publications that were identified during the previous stage of the study. The objective of our study is to analyse and evaluate the relative quality of the journal papers that comprise 78% of that dataset. Such evaluation is established with reference to the Academic Journal Guide produced by the Association of Business Schools (ABS, 2015).