This study investigates all available literature related to critical thinking in business education in a survey of publications in the field produced from 1990-2019. It conducts a thematic analysis ...of 787 articles found in Web of Science and Google Scholar, including a specific focus on 55 highly-cited articles. The aim is to investigate the importance of critical thinking in business education, how it is conceptualised in business education research, the business contexts in which critical thinking is situated, and the key and more marginal themes related to critical thinking outlined in the business and business education literature. The paper outlines six key areas and topics associated with those areas. It suggests future directions for further scholarly work in the area of critical thinking in business education.
The purpose of this paper is to identify the main themes of Green Procurement (GP) in the private sector through a literature review of papers published between 1996 and 2013 and to develop some ...future research directions. GP research has garnered interest from academics and industry alike. This is demonstrated by the increasing number of academic papers published in recent years. This literature review builds on the three themes in the adoption of GP identified from the literature: 1) the motivation and drivers for the implementation of GP; 2) barriers to the implementation of GP; 3) the performance impacts of the adoption of GP. Given that there are distinctive features of the private sector, compared to the public sector, this analysis focuses on GP in the private sector. The approach to GP holds important implications for managers, by directing limited resources towards projects which intersect both environmental performance and economic performance. The article discusses interesting findings, develops a conceptual framework of GP and suggests a number of directions for future research.
•Identify the main themes in Green procurement in the private sector.•Develop a conceptual framework based on the literature review.•Suggest a number of future research directions for Green procurement.
Purpose
The growing service sector has experienced several revolutions that have transformed the way services are created and delivered. In parallel, services increasingly pique the interest of ...scholars, resulting in an expanding body of knowledge. Accordingly, it is time to reflect on extant service research, assess its boundaries, and think about its future. This paper aims to consider three research questions: How has service research evolved over the past 27 years? Which articles have most influenced the evolution of service research in the past 27 years? What are the most promising research themes for the future?
Design/methodology/approach
To answer these questions, the authors analyze the contents of 3,177 service research articles published in ten major academic journals between 1993 and August 2019. Multiple correspondence analysis reveals the evolution of key service research themes and their underlying relationships.
Findings
The research themes are organized in a growth–share matrix with four quadrants (stars, question marks, cash cows and pets) and also combine into four research clusters (human resource management, organizational behavior and strategy, technology, and operations and customer behavior and marketing). Together with a specified list of influential articles that have shaped the evolution of service research, these insights suggest an agenda for research.
Originality/value
Acknowledging the vast growth of service research, this study presents an up-to-date picture of the discipline and an agenda to stimulate continued research.
Research on service innovation appears in several research disciplines, with important contributions in marketing, management, and operations research. Although the concept is widely used, few ...research papers have explicitly defined service innovation. This dearth of research is the motivation for the present study. Through a systematic review of 1301 articles on service innovation appearing in academic journals between 1979 and 2014, this article examines research defining service innovation. The study identifies the key characteristics within 84 definitions of service innovation in different perspectives (assimilation, demarcation and synthesis) and shows how the meaning of the concept is changing. The review suggests that the large variety in definitions limits and hinders knowledge development of service innovation.
This article provides an overview of mixed methods research and mixed studies reviews. These two approaches are used to combine the strengths of quantitative and qualitative methods and to compensate ...for their respective limitations. This article is structured in three main parts. First, the epistemological background for mixed methods will be presented. Afterward, we present the main types of mixed methods research designs and techniques as well as guidance for planning, conducting, and appraising mixed methods research. In the last part, we describe the main types of mixed studies reviews and provide a tool kit and examples. Future research needs to offer guidance for assessing mixed methods research and reporting mixed studies reviews, among other challenges.
•The paper reviews 1874 microfinance papers published from 1997 to 2017.•It performs an information management analysis of the microfinance field.•The review is based on bibliometric data.•Keyword ...co-occurrence networks and citation networks were exploited for knowledge mapping.
In the last 20 years, microfinance has moved from a promise to reality, although with ups and downs. This paper reviews 1874 papers published from 1997 to 2017 to perform a scientometric analysis of the microfinance field. The literature review is based on bibliometric data: keyword co-occurrence networks and citation networks were exploited for knowledge mapping. Data analysis shows the two research traditions: papers focusing on clients (welfarists) and papers focusing on microfinance entities themselves (institutionalists). Institutionalism, which had little presence in the early research in microfinance, now exhibits great strength. A chronological analysis reveals the evolution of the topics most interesting to researchers: the first stage described the innovations of the microcredit practices and their impact; the second and very expansive stage in which microfinance institutions’ peculiarities were analyzed; and nowadays the sector is mature but with negative aspects arising, such as mission drift. The keywords analysis discovers emerging research topics, shows the use of sophisticated techniques, and recognizes an emerging trend of the sector: achieving financial inclusion.
Ever-growing globalization and industrialization put forward impending requirements for green and sustainable logistics (G&SL). Over the past decades, G&SL initiatives triggered worldwide ...deliberations, aiming at easing negative transport externalities and improving supply chain performance. This review-based paper attempts to offer a joint quantitative and qualitative understanding for the overall evolutionary trend, knowledge structure, and literature gaps of the G&SL research field. Employing the science mapping approach, a total of 306 major paper published from 1999 to 2019 were retrieved, elaborated on, and synthesized. Visualized statistics regarding publication years, journal allocation/co-citation, inter-country/institution collaboration, influential articles, co-occurred keywords, and time view clusters of research themes were analyzed bibliographically. On this basis, a total of 50 sub-branches of G&SL knowledge were classified and thematically discussed based on five alignments, namely (i) social-environmental-economic research, (ii) planning, policy and management, (iii) application and practice, (iv) technology, and (v) operations research. Finally, the current knowledge obstacles and the future research opportunities were suggested. The findings contribute to portray a systematic intellectual prospect for the state quo, hotspots, and academic frontiers of G&SL research. Moreover, it provides researchers and practitioners with heuristic thoughts to govern transportation ecology and logistics service quality.
Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and the emergence of AI‐based social applications in the market have propelled research on the possibility of consumers developing relationships ...with AI. Motivated by the diversity of approaches and inconsistent findings in this emerging research stream, this systematic literature review analyzes 37 peer‐reviewed empirical studies focusing on human–AI relationships published between 2018 and 2023. We identify three major theoretical domains (social psychology, communication and media studies, and human–machine interactions) as foundations for conceptual development, and detail theories used in the reviewed papers. Given the radically new nature of social AI innovation, we recommend developing a novel theoretical approach that would synergistically utilize cross‐disciplinary literature. Analysis of the methodology indicates that quantitative studies dominate this research stream, while qualitative, longitudinal, and mixed‐method approaches are used infrequently. Examination of research models and variables used in the studies suggests the need to reconceptualize factors and processes of human–AI relationship, such as agency, autonomy, authenticity, reciprocity, and empathy, to better correspond to the social AI context. Based on our analysis, we propose an integrative conceptual framework and offer directions for future research that incorporate the need to develop a comprehensive theory of human ‐ AI relationships, explore the nomological networks of its key constructs, and implement methodological variety and triangulation.
As network techniques rapidly evolve, attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated and threatening. Network intrusion detection has been widely accepted as an effective method to deal with network ...threats. Many approaches have been proposed, exploring different techniques and targeting different types of traffic. Anomaly-based network intrusion detection is an important research and development direction of intrusion detection. Despite the extensive investigation of anomaly-based network intrusion detection techniques, there lacks a systematic literature review of recent techniques and datasets. We follow the methodology of systematic literature review to survey and study 119 top-cited papers on anomaly-based intrusion detection. Our study rigorously and comprehensively investigates the technical landscape of the field in order to facilitate subsequent research within this field. Specifically, our investigation is conducted from the following perspectives: application domains, data preprocessing and attack-detection techniques, evaluation metrics, coauthor relationships, and datasets. Based on the research results, we identify unsolved research challenges and unstudied research topics from each perspective, respectively. Finally, we present several promising high-impact future research directions.
PDF
