The evolution of the intellectual structure of operations management—1980–2006: A citation/co‐citation analysis

Abstract Citation analysis combined with a network analysis of co‐citation data from three major operations management (OM) journals is used to reveal the evolution of the intellectual structure of the OM field between 1980 and 2006. This spans the entire time since the beginning of research journals specific to the field. Employing a bibliometric citation/co‐citation analysis to investigate the foundations of the discipline enables a robust, quantitative approach to uncovering the evolution of research in OM. The study finds that the intellectual structure of the field made statistically significant changes between the 1980s, the 1990s, and the 2000s and evolved from a pre‐occupation with narrow, tactical topics toward more strategic, macrotopics, including new research methods and techniques. A factor analysis identifies the 12 top knowledge groups in the field and how they change over the decades. Illustrations of the structure of the co‐citations representing the field are generated from a spring‐embedded algorithm that is an improvement over the standard multi‐dimensional scaling (MDS) approach to illustrating the knowledge groups.