The development of service science in management research: a bibliometric analysis

Purpose – Over the last decades, new service perspectives have been granted increasing attention in management research. Among them, Service Science emerged in the early 2000s as an interdisciplinary field of study embracing computer science, engineering, management and social science. The aim of this paper is to analyse how it developed in management research and which are its most important contributions originated in this specific field. Design/Methodology/approach – This work is based on a bibliometric analysis of the publications about Service Science in management literature. Bibliographical data gathered from ISI Web of Science have been examined using a web-based social network analysis (SNA) on the citation data. The analysis identifies the important authors, journals, and keywords in the dataset based on the number of occurences and citation counts. A citation network of the provided records is created and used to identify the important papers according to their in-degree, total citation count and PageRank scores. The analysis finds also often-cited references that were not included in the original dataset downloaded from the Web of Science. Findings – Despite the emergence of Service Science is more properly attributable to other areas such as computer science and engineering, the analysis shows that since 2007 it has developed significantly in the field of management capturing the interest of several scholars. From the analysis it emerges that the most studied aspects are value co-creation, innovation and the link with Service- Dominant logic. The examination of the most important publications shows that Service Science stimulates the integration of different disciplines in the study of how organizations create value for customers and shareholders through innovation, that could not be achieved through such disciplines working in isolation. Research limitations/implications – The limit of this work is that the analysis is based on the bibliographical data gathered exclusively from Web of Science because it is the only database that provides the citation data. For scholars, this work is useful for developing future studies on Service Science because it provides a clear view of the most debated concepts in the field of management and the most productive authors and journals. Moreover, the article shows a ranking of the most important publications to be considered on the basis of three specific measures (in-degree, total citation count and PageRank scores). Originality/value – This work is the first to apply the bibliometric analysis to the study of Service Science. To date, there are no other data available on the citation social-network for this field.