Issues in reverse supply chain, part III: classification and simple analysis

TLDR

Growing environmental concern and customer awareness have increased attention to reverse supply chain research. The paper aims to provide a comprehensive reference list to stimulate further RSC research. The review analyzed 543 articles—including journal papers, web documents, conference materials, and working papers—from 1967 to 2008 across 100 international journals. Based on the review, two classification schemes were introduced—one based on content-related issues and another on solution methodology—revealing substantial research potential and strong growth in RSC research.

Abstract

Due to growing environmental concern and increasing awareness among customers, reverse supply chain (RSC) has received much attention among researchers and practitioners. Therefore it is necessary to provide a comprehensive list of references for other researchers (or readers), who are interested in RSC research to help stimulate further interest. In this paper, we present classification schemes and a simple analysis for the reverse supply chain. This literature review was mainly based on journal articles but also included web based documents, conference materials, working papers, etc. A total of 543 articles were reviewed, of which 506 were published between 1967 and 2008 from 100 reputed international journals. Based on the literature review carried out and the nature of research observed in RSC, we have introduced two classification schemes to systematically organise the published articles. The first classification scheme is based on the content related issues on RSC and the second one is based on the solution methodology followed by the researchers. These classification schemes indicate that there is considerable research potential for RSC. The results also show that there is strong growth in RSC research.