A bibliometric and thematic review of business excellence journal papers from 1990 to 2020

Abstract

This paper presents a bibliometric and thematic review of journal papers specifically related to BE frameworks (BEFs) that are used for national BE awards and advocated by the Global Excellence Model (GEM) Council. The paper will help researchers and practitioners locate relevant BE data and information more easily, and guide them on which journals in which to publish them. The research includes an assessment of the average citation rate per year and BE paper. 10,089 potential BE papers were initially identified from a keyword search of the Elsevier database, to ultimately identify 415 as BE papers. These papers were analysed and have subsequently been made available to all researchers in an excel file. This research found that: the peak in publishing BE papers was in 2019; Total Quality Management and Business Excellence is the most popular journal for publishing BE papers; the most popular research area is studying ‘Design of BEFs’ and there is potential for future research on ‘Impact of BE’; and the average number of citations per year for a BE paper is 2.1, with the most cited paper achieving an average of 29.6 citations per year. The research includes recommendations on how researchers can increase their citation rate in this area.

Keywords:

• business excellence
• excellence award
• excellence framework
• excellence model
• MBNQA
• EFQM
• GEM Council

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 VOSviewer is a quantitative analytical tool for creating bibliometric maps of science that visualises relationships between different metadata of publications’ such as authors and keywords (Van Eck & Waltman, 2011).

2 Organisations that are responsible for promoting and facilitating the use of BE.