SSMED and its multidisciplinary nature: an automatic literature review

Purpose – In recent years, the academic world has seen the spread of a growing interest in understanding the dynamics characterizing studies conducted in different research areas (Golinelli et al. 2015; Gummesson et al., 2011; Barile and Polese, 2010; Lusch et al, 2008). This trend seems to have taken hold also in the scientific community interested in issues related to Service Science Management Engineering and Design (Spohrer et al., 2017, Maglio et al., 2015; Polese and Di Nauta, 2013). In this regard, the present study aims to investigate whether the multidisciplinary nature of SSMED, theoretically recognized, implies an effective orientation of academics towards manifold research areas. Design/Methodology/approach – The work is based on an automatic literature review, conducted by using knowledge extraction techniques integrated in an IT tool developed for the objective pursued with this research. The tool has been applied on several databases (such as Wiley, etc.), enabling the analysis of different studies about SSMED and the extraction of the main trend characterizing the evolution of this science known as multidisciplinary along the time line. Findings – The results emerging from the analysis show that, despite SSMED has progressively developed as a multidisciplinary science, actually, most of the studies related to it focuses on topics linked mainly to business management. However, the consideration of the time variable allows understanding that, within SSMED, especially in recent years, the number of contributions linkable to topics belonging to other research areas is progressively growing up (Polese et al., 2016; Russo Spena et al., 2013; Barile and Saviano, 2010). Research limitations/implications – The research involves considerable theoretical implications, fostering an important advancement in the state of art in terms of more concrete and greater awareness of the multidisciplinary nature of SSMED. However, the study presents the limit of considering not all available databases. In fact, the involvement of additional databases, perhaps, would have been capable of leading to potentially different findings. Originality/value – The work proposes a novel approach to carry out conceptual analytics summarizing trends along the timeline. It allows going far beyond the traditional techniques used in science mapping through the evaluation of scientific publications indexed or stored in big databases (such as systematic literature review, bibliometrics, and research performance analysis), enabling the assessment of the (chrono) logical evolution of the studies dedicated to SSMED. Moreover, unlike what occurs with other techniques (e.g. systematic literature review, bibliometrics, and research performance analysis), the development and the subsequent use of a specific IT tool for the analysis guarantees the advantage to automatically consider, extract and analyze in real time all contributions available on the selected databases.