Identifying the orientations of sustainable supply chain research using data mining techniques: Contributions and new developments

To be effective, sustainable development must maintain an equilibrium between its social, environmental and economic efforts. Several studies have suggested that an unbalance exists about the attention given to those three dimensions; however, few contributions have demonstrated such unbalance. This research describes a synthesis of two manual and semiautomatic methods published in the technical literature and includes additional developments, conceived to speed up and increase the accuracy of the analysis of the sustainable orientation of a corpus. The results are compared with the previous studies on about ten years of literature from top-tier journals dealing with Sustainable Supply Chain issues. The results confirm unbalance on research in this field. They show that most of the studies have been focussed on environmental and economic aspects, leaving aside social issues.