Evolution of Operational Improvement in Management Science/Operations Research (2000-2016):A Social Network Co-Word Analysis

This paper elucidates the process of evolution of Operational Improvement (OI) by a coword analysis based on data downloaded from the database of Web of Science. Our research reveals that the published papers indicate an overall growth trend during the selected 17 years and have a rapid increasing between 2002 and 2008 but hold a relatively stable growth in recent years. “Quality management” and “Lean and six sigma management” are direct and core themes of OI in most research phases since they appeared. Lean and six sigma management especially locates itself in the most critical position in the research field of OI in Management Science/Operations Research (MS/OR). Research methods, optimization algorithm and decision analysis provide support for the research of OI in most stages. In recent years, some peripheral research topics also appear as emerging topics in the research of OI which need pay more attention in future, such as service and CRM, healthcare services and risk and safety management. The operations improvement will have an immeasurable effect on the service and healthcare field. Network characteristic indexes indicate that the overall tightness of the keywords show a gradual declining trend with the timespan ongoing, the research themes’ dispersion of the second and third stage research points to some extent and keywords in the first and second stages has the higher degree of contact with the adjacent keywords.