Systematic review of adopting blockchain in supply chain management: bibliometric analysis and theme discussion

Abstract

Traditional supply chain management faces challenges such as low level of information sharing and lack of transparency. Due to the features such as tamper-proof, reliability and traceability, the blockchain technology enhances the trust among stakeholders and enables transparent transactions and open collaboration, which can reduce the risk of supply chain disruptions. Accordingly, blockchain technology-based supply chain management has attracted more attention from academics and practitioners. However, existing review studies mainly focus on different industries or topics and lack a more comprehensive analysis. Therefore, this paper presents a systematic review integrating bibliometric analysis with theme analysis to understand the current research state in BT-SCM and discuss its future research trends. On the one hand, VOSviewer is used to conduct bibliometric analysis to explore the influences of existing studies from six aspects: publication year, author, country, keyword, journal, and article citation. On the other hand, the functional application of BT-SCM is discussed from logistics traceability, supply chain finance, supply chain collaboration, sustainable management and risk management to determine the research status, and the enablers and barriers of blockchain application in SCM are summarised to facilitate practitioners to adopt BT, and finally the potential research directions are proposed for scholars in this field.

KEYWORDS:

• Blockchain
• supply chain management
• literature review
• bibliometric analysis
• theme analysis

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the editors, reviewers and experts for their time and constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The data used in this paper can be freely available by the authors upon request.

Additional information

Funding

This research is directly supported by the National Social Science Fund of China (grant number 22BJY162). Its support is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes on contributors

Yanhu Han

Yanhu Han is an associate professor of Management Science and Engineering at the School of Economics and Management, Chang’an University of China. His research interests include the integration of emerging digital technologies and supply chain management, supply chain scheduling optimisation, etc.

Xiao Fang

Xiao Fang is currently pursuing her M.S. degree in Management Science and Engineering at the School of Economics and Management, Chang’an University of China. Her research interests include supply chain management combining the blockchain technology and other digital technologies.