A state-of-art literature review reflecting 15 years of focus on sustainable supply chain management

Abstract A large number of journals and special volumes are publishing research concerned with sustainable supply chain (SSC). The importance of this the topic has significantly grown over time thus receiving increased attention from academics and practitioners in this area. This research critically analyzes the content of 286 papers published in different journals in the area over the span of fifteen years (2002–2016). The reviewed literature was structured using the following categories: year, journal, research methodology, research design, operation research (OR)/mathematical tools and techniques, data analysis technique, industry sector, multi-criteria decision making (MCDM), authors, universities, country, enablers, and barriers. This enabled crucial gaps in knowledge of SSC to be identified allowing future research opportunities in the field to be determined. The major finding indicates that the research field is being dominated by the qualitative study. Also, of the quantitatively based studies that appeared in the literature, linear programming problem is the most often used solution approach to optimize the complex sustainable supply chain management problems. Drawn results show that there is enough scope to expand the research field and several opportunities still exist which needs to be investigated such as quantitative modeling, use of advance techniques and development of efficient algorithms.