Louis Y. Y. Lu

Enterprises looking to be competitive are constantly looking for a continuous increase in productivity, quality, and level of services. With the development of the industry 4.0 concept, manufacturers are more confident about the new advantages of automation and systems integration. Lean management is a well-developed and empirically proven managerial strategy. Combining lean and industry 4.0 practices seems to be a necessary evolutionary step to further raise the level of operational excellence. This study applied the main path analysis method to explore the development trend of lean management in the academic field. First, this study adopted the Scopus database to collect relevant papers, then analyzed their overall development trajectory by using Main Path 437 software, and used the g-index and h-index to identify more influential journals. Next, this study clustered the papers with similar topics into several groups, and then used Wordle software to present the keywords of each group in a word cloud that serves as a reference for naming. Thus, the top five groups obtained are as follows: “Lean production concept and application”, “Lean Six Sigma concept and application”, “Lean system integration and application”, “Lean construction concept and application”, and “Lean healthcare concept and application”. Finally, this study provides explanations and conclusions on each group’s development trajectory, as well as research recommendations in the field of lean production. The findings can serve as guides for industry, government, and academia as they develop future lean production development strategies. This study utilized an integrated analysis approach to successfully and effectively depict the trajectory of lean production development and applications, identify future research and development directions, and generate technological forecasts.

The study collected papers on radio frequency identification (RFID) applications from an academic database to explore the topic’s development trajectory and predict future development trends. Overall, 3820 papers were collected, and citation networks were established on the basis of the literature references. Main path analysis was performed on the networks to determine the development trajectory of RFID applications. After clustering into groups, the results are twenty clusters, and six clusters with citation counts of more than 200 were obtained. Cluster and word cloud analyses were conducted, and the main research themes were identified: RFID applications in supply chain management, antenna design, collision prevention protocols, privacy and safety, tag sensors, and localization systems. Text mining was performed on the titles and abstracts of the papers to identify frequent keywords and topics of interest to researchers. Finally, statistical analysis of papers published in the previous 4 years revealed RFID applications in construction, aquaculture, and experimentation are less frequently discussed themes. This study provides planning directions for industry, and the findings serve as a reference for business domain. The integrated analysis successfully determined the trajectory of RFID-based technological development and applications as well as forecast the direction of future research.

This study collected literature on augmented reality (AR) from academic and patent databases to plot the historic development trajectory of AR and forecast its future research and development trends. A total of 3193 and 13,629 papers were collected from academic and patent databases, respectively. First, a network was established using references from the academic literature; main path analysis was conducted on this reference network to plot the overall development trajectory. Subsequent cluster and word cloud analyses revealed the following five major groups of AR research topics: AR surgical navigation applications, AR education applications, AR applications in manufacturing, AR applications in architecture, and AR applications in visual tracking. Subsequently, the relationships between the overall development trajectory and the five AR research topics were compared. Next, the title and abstract of AR-related academic and patent papers were subjected to text mining to identify keywords with a high frequency of occurrence. The results can provide a reference for industry, government, and academia when planning future development strategies for the AR field. This research adopted an integrated analysis procedure to plot the trajectory of AR technology development and applications successfully and effectively, predict future patent research and development directions and produce technological forecasts.

This paper presents a unique approach to translating a complex citation network into simple main paths. We apply this approach to explore the knowledge diffusion paths of corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature over the past 40 years. ISI Web of Science (WOS) is used as the data source for retrieving the CSR papers and their citation data. We then apply main path analysis to identify and visualize the local, global, and key‐route main paths. The local and global main paths identify those papers that play a key role in the knowledge diffusion of CSR. The key‐route main path clearly exhibits the divergence‐convergence pattern of CSR development. Although the divergence‐convergence pattern of a theory's development has been hinted at in previous literature, we propose the key‐route main path to systematically identify and exhibit it. This approach provides a useful method for researchers to figure out the development cycles of a target field. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

This study enhances main path analysis by proposing several variants to the original approach. Main path analysis is a bibliometric method capable of tracing the most significant paths in a citation network and is commonly used to trace the development trajectory of a research field. We highlight several limitations of the original main path analysis and suggest new, complementary approaches to overcome these limitations. In contrast to the original local main path, the new approaches generate the global main path, the backward local main path, multiple main paths, and key‐route main paths. Each of them is obtained via a perspective different from the original approach. By simultaneously conducting the new, complementary approaches, one uncovers the key development of the target discipline from a broader view. To demonstrate the value of these new approaches, we simultaneously apply them to a set of academic articles related to the Hirsch index. The results show that the integrated approach discovers several paths that are not captured by the original approach. Among these new approaches, the key‐route approach is especially useful and hints at a divergence–convergence–divergence structure in the development of the Hirsch index.