Description:
The nature of healthcare products may add to the level of complexity of their supply chain management. The vital role of efficient management of the supply chain of blood and blood products lies in its capability to facilitate the flow of blood and information along the chain in the presence of complex challenges; this involves all aspects of design, including location and capacity decisions, network reliability, and network robustness subject to optimization of performance criteria involving cost, shortage, and wastage. This study reviews the literature and presents a bibliometric analysis of the research on the supply chain of blood and blood products. The first goal is to explore cooperation relationships between authors, countries, institutions, and journals. The second goal is to analyze and determine the publication trends, explain the changing rules, identify popular topics, and detect shifts in research attention. The third goal is to discuss future research directions from the perspectives of problems and methods. Finally, the fourth goal is to provide a bibliometric analysis of the related literature with a special focus on the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on the considered criteria, a total of 1087 articles published before June 25, 2023 were obtained from the Scopus database. The VOSviewer and Biblioshiny programs were used to perform a variety of bibliometric analyses. The findings of the study help scholars get a comprehensive understanding of the literature on the supply chain of blood and blood products and guide interested authors who want to conduct further research in this area