Research fronts in data envelopment analysis

Research activities relating to data envelopment analysis (DEA) have grown at a fast rate recently. Exactly what activities have been carrying the research momentum forward is a question of particular interest to the research community. The purpose of this study is to find these research activities,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Omega (Oxford) 2016-01, Vol.58, p.33-45
Main Authors: Liu, John S., Lu, Louis Y.Y., Lu, Wen-Min
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bootstrap method
Critical path
Data envelopment analysis
Literature survey
Main path analysis
Research front
Studies
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Summary:Research activities relating to data envelopment analysis (DEA) have grown at a fast rate recently. Exactly what activities have been carrying the research momentum forward is a question of particular interest to the research community. The purpose of this study is to find these research activities, or research fronts, in DEA. A research front refers to a coherent topic or issue addressed by a group of research articles in recent years. The large amount of DEA literature makes it difficult to use any traditional qualitative methodology to sort out the matter. Thus, this study applies a network clustering method to group the literature through a citation network established from the DEA literature over the period 2000 to 2014. The keywords of the articles in each discovered group help pinpoint its research focus. The four research fronts identified are “bootstrapping and two-stage analysis”, “undesirable factors”, “cross-efficiency and ranking”, and “network DEA, dynamic DEA, and SBM”. Each research front is then examined with key-route main path analysis to uncover the elements in its core. In addition to presenting the research fronts, this study also updates the main paths and author statistics of DEA development since its inception and compares them with those reported in a previous study. •This study presents research fronts in DEA in the period 2000-2014.•These research fronts include two-stage analysis, undesirable factors, cross-efficiency, and network DEA.•The growth of the network DEA subarea shows a surge in the period 2008-2012.•This study also updates the main paths and author statistics of DEA development since its inception.
ISSN:0305-0483
1873-5274
DOI:10.1016/j.omega.2015.04.004