Identifying risk issues and research advancements in supply chain risk management

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the research development in supply chain risk management (SCRM), which has shown an increasing global attention in recent years. Literature survey and citation/co-citation analysis are used to fulfil the research task. Literature survey has undertaken a thorough search of articles on selected journals relevant to supply chain operations management. Meanwhile, citation/co-citation analysis uses Web of Sciences database to disclose SCRM development between 1995 and 2009. Both the approaches show similar trends of rising publications over the past 15 years. This review has piloted us to identify and classify the potential risk associated with different flows, namely material, cash and information flows. Consequently, we identify some research gaps. Even though there is a pressing need and awareness of SCRM from industrial aspect, quantitative models in the field are relatively lacking and information flow risk has received less attention. It is also interesting to observe the evolutions and advancements of SCRM discipline. One finding is that the intellectual structure of the field made statistically significant increase during 2000-2005 and evolved from passively reacting to vague general issues of disruptions towards more proactively managing supply chain risk from system perspectives.