Interfaces between production engineering and the public affairs: evidences from bibliometric analysis

• Published in: Scientometrics 2015-11, Vol.105 (2), p.1183-1193
• Main Authors: de Jesus, Igor Rosa Dias, Costa, Helder Gomes
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Computer Science; Information Storage and Retrieval; Library Science
• ISSN: 0138-9130; 1588-2861
• DOI: 10.1007/s11192-015-1724-1

This paper aims to understand how the knowledge field of production engineering interacts with the field of public affairs, which is related to government, public bodies and public policies for many sectors. It is structured under bibliometric analysis and reveals a panorama of 188 papers from 2000 to 2012 that presents where and how these relationships between production engineering and the public affairs occur. This study presents five different analysis to understand these possibilities: papers by year, papers by production engineering areas, papers by author, papers by journal and papers by public functions. Main findings of this research show that the leading areas where these interfaces occur in academic research are environment, sustainability, industry and organizations. Another relevant result is that the intersection of production engineering and the public sector has not been figured year as a core research topic to any individual researcher or to a group of researchers around the world. The main contribution of this paper to the academic community is the pioneering on presenting a view on the size and on the main characteristics of this interface through bibliometric analysis.