# Supplier Risk in Supply Chain Risk Management: An Updated Conceptual Framework
## 4 Results and Discussion
### Research Trends, Future Directions, and Conceptual Framework  
In order to objectively determine current and future research trends, we combined the bibliometric results from the software with a manual analysis of the literature on SCRM in suppliers. In order to further investigate the topic and ensure even more robustness of the results, we also manually analyzed the general literature on SCRM, aiming to identify SCRM trends that may utilize the supplier management approach but were not covered by the search terms of the main research, as explained in Section 2 (Materials and Methods). During this research's design phase, it became clear that we needed to investigate which major issues companies should be concerned about, as well as the researchers interested in the subject, when dealing with suppliers in order to apply SCRM effectively. This requirement was filled during the literature review process, when we discovered that [PERSON] [1] had listed five main issues (dimensions) of supplier management in the context of risk. From this moment on, we managed to review research developments in each of the author's proposed dimensions, as shown in Section 3.2 (SCRM from the Supplier Management Approach) and Section 4.1 (Research Profiling). Nevertheless, nearly two decades later, we feel the need to verify if those topics are prone to an update. Based on the CiteSpace findings, we identified that supplier selection is the most researched topic, simulation is the preferred method, and the automotive industry is the main research environment. Table 1 also allows us to deduce three major moments in the evolution of SCRM research with a focus on suppliers. The first moment, from 1999 to 2008, represented the initial developments that related the topic of risk to supply chain management in order to obtain competitive advantages and distribute risks among the members of the chain [65]. The major trend of the period, centered in the year 2006, was to analyze the supplier base and the chain that interconnects the organizations (cluster #2). This moment is covered by the research of [PERSON] [1], which is also the most relevant of this period and drove the branches focused on suppliers, a subset of SCRM, as we identified in the CiteNet Explorer citation network. The second period, from 2009 to 2018, represented a 68% growth in the topic and determined the research trend on supplier selection, centered in 2017 (cluster #0). As we identified through CiteSpace and CiteNet Explorer, this is the topic that has attracted the most researchers in the area to date and constitutes the most significant knowledge path. This topic demonstrates continuity in relation to [PERSON] [1], who pointed out \"supplier selection\" as one of the major dimensions of the supply management approach. Some of the main developments of this dimension in the SCRM literature are presented in Section 3.2 (SCRM from the Supplier Management Perspective). Some authors also explored the chain as a whole and considered the risks of multi-tier suppliers to build a more robust selection model [66; 67; 68; 69; 70]. We address the overall importance of accounting for multi-tier supplier risks in Section 3.1 (Supply Chain Risks of Direct and Indirect Suppliers). However, although it has already been extensively explored, the topic of supplier selection is not exhausted, since new quantitative methods and new decision criteria are still being incorporated into the problem of supplier selection, which continues to be a current research trend. Thus, we identified that this topic also continues to be part of future research directions, mainly the observation of the indirect supply chain, with the search for the selection of suppliers that have resilient and sustainable chains, and the development of new hybrid analysis and selection methods, combining existing techniques, including integrating with the application of AI. These observations are included as future research directions in articles published since 2020 [15; 23; 38; 44; 48].