Total Quality Management & Business Excellence: a 33-year overview using bibliometric and content analysis

Abstract

As a prestigious and unique journal on total quality management (TQM), Total Quality Management & Business Excellence (TQM&BE) has significantly contributed to theoretical and practical advancement. Retrieving 2588 literature from Scopus between 1990 and 2022, this paper applies CiteSpace and VOSviewer to analyze the publications per year and by geographic distribution, productive authors, highly cited literature, and related journals. Through combining content analysis, research content and hotspots of eight key themes are summarized. Additionally, this paper compares TQM&BE with seven journals on quality management, and predicts development potential of impact factor and quartile by ARIMA method. The results show the following: (1) With the growth in publications, TQM&BE has been gaining approval from numerous countries worldwide, especially in universities in China, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Sweden. (2) TQM&BE publishes many highly cited classics in areas such as frameworks of TQM, customer satisfaction, and improvement of quality innovation approaches, effectively expanding accumulation of achievements. (3) Sustainable quality management, excellence 4.0, role of e-service quality in customer loyalty, and upgradation of Kano model are its recent hotspots. (4) TQM&BE is projected to maintain high-speed growth in impact factor, while its academic authority will increasingly surpass other journals on quality management.

Keywords:

• Total Quality Management & Business Excellence (TQM&BE)
• bibliometrics
• content analysis
• research hotspots
• ARIMA
• trend prediction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In the Scopus database, certain papers labeled as conference papers may be categorized as both articles and conference papers in the WoS.

2 There are some discrepancies in how Scopus and WoS category reviews. For instance, the paper labeled as a review in Scopus may be classified as an article in WoS.

3 For consistency with bibliometric software, the format adopted in this paper is to list surnames before given names when citing authors.

4 The AC since the renaming calculated by Singh et al. (2023) is not equal to that in this study, which may be due to the different time of collecting the data of citations and the fact that this paper is later.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 71872110], the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 72201155] and the National Foreign Experts Program of China [grant number G2021013045L].