Abstract:

The research mainly aims at identifying the hotspots of the inventory management by drawing knowledge maps and providing the visualized reference in this field. Firstly, this study takes inventory management articles in web of sciences during 1986 to 2017 as the research objects. Then it gives the inventory management knowledge maps and extracts the clustering keywords by using Citespace 5.0.R4 and VOSviewer. Based on co-word analysis, the three special clusters are found: inventory optimization strategy, inventory pricing and inventory technology. In the end, it analyzes the structure and evolution of the three clusters. Bibliographic item co-occurrence matrix builder (BICOMB) is used to extract keywords of the “journal” and “researcher” in the inventory management research fields. Setting three parameters such as the cited half-life, centrality, frequency and keywords for data mining, it shows that inventory management research focused on the classic topics including economic order quantity, dynamic pricing, design and technology, etc, and the new topics such as channel coordination, hierarchical price and simulation.

Key words: Inventory management, Knowledge mapping, Co-word analysis, Clustering analysis