A Systematic Review of Reverse Logistics Research: Bibliometric Study of the Years 2013-2023

Reverse logistics has generated much interest among entrepreneurs, academics and civil society. This is because you can recover the value of products that are used and returned, which is why it has become one of the key elements in supply chain management. Through a bibliometric study and documentary analysis, this work aims to describe how the scientific production of reverse logistics has evolved quantitatively from the year 2000 to 2023. The articles retrieved from the Web of Science portal, from Clarivate Analytics, provided the primary data to conduct a bibliometric method and content analysis. The search produced 1148 articles, with production peaks in the year 2000 up to 2023. Networks of co-occurrence, citation and co-authorship were also analyzed. During the period of study (2000-2023), there were 124 working groups; it was found that the four groups of researchers who worked around the issue of reverse logistics are the ones with the highest number of citations. Of the 548 publications about the subject “reverse logistics”, the researchers addressed different aspects such as competitive advantage, the firm performance, implementations in different sectors, sustainability, the study of new strategies to improve control of inventories systems, demand, supply, trying to control uncertainty both in transportation and in handling waste and returns by the final user. (All of this section was modified).