# Key Performance Indicators for Food Supply Chain: A Bibliometric and Systematic Literature Review
## 3 Results
### Outcomes of the Statistical Analyses
Figure 3: Distribution of papers by source (Note: sources with >2 papers are displayed). The above figure reveals that out of the 15 sources with the highest number of publications, _Agricultural Systems_ stands at the top (5 papers out of 125; [38; 39; 40; 41; 42]), followed by _British Food Journal_[19; 43; 44; 45], _Journal of Cleaner Production_[20; 46; 47; 48] and _Sustainability_[49; 50; 51; 52], with 4 documents each. It is interesting to note that these mentioned journals specifically deal with food (as expected) or sustainability issues; the latter stresses one of the main research areas when managing FSC. Regarding the geographical distribution, the mapping of the studies was carried out by providing the nationality (on the basis of the affiliation) of the first author. The figure below (Figure 4) shows the main results, limited to countries with at least four publications. The majority of the selected papers are from Italy (14 papers out of 125, 11.2% of the sample), the United Kingdom (12), and the United States (8). This is in line with the fact that in Italy the agriculture and food sector greatly impacts economic gains and jobs, contributing to about 4% of gross domestic product (GDP), with the largest contribution attributable to the primary sector [53]; in the United States as well, it contributes to the 5.6% of the GDP [54]. As can be seen from the figure above, no countries in Africa have more than four contributions on the topic of KPIs in the FSC, despite their huge problems in terms of food scarcity or food security. Citation analysis has become particularly popular in review studies because of its ability to accurately identify influential papers on a given topic [55]. The table below (Table 3) shows the most cited papers: the upper part of the table presents the 10 most cited papers overall, while the lower part organizes the publications in descending order of the number of citations per year. The right part of the table shows the topics covered and the approaches/techniques adopted for the most cited papers. Thirty-three publications received more than twenty-five citations on Scopus at the time of writing, and twelve with even more than fifty citations. As shown in the table above, the paper with the highest number of citations (developed by [56], with 206 citations) is a document in which a chance-constrained model for the multi-supplier inventory routing problem is proposed; it is then followed by [57] and [58], with 196 and 97 citations, respectively. In the first document, food security with reference to a specific family of bacteria was investigated, while in the second, a literature review is proposed on life cycle costing studies related to food waste; this topic is somehow a foretaste of common trends of research: the economic issue and the sustainability one (in this case, in terms of food waste). It is interesting to note that the top two positions are the same for both rankings, while the third and fourth positions are reversed. Overall, five publications appear in both rankings [56; 57; 58; 59; 60]. Figure 4: Map of the publications according to the first author’s nationality. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c} \hline \hline \# & **Paper** & **Year** & **Citations** & **Topic Covered** & \begin{tabular}{c} **Approach/Technique** \\ **Adopted** \\ \end{tabular}  \\ \hline
**1** & [56] & 2018 & 206 & Perishability & \begin{tabular}{c} Inventory Routing \\ Problem \\ \end{tabular}  \\ \hline
**2** & [57] & 2014 & 196 & Food security & Literature review \\ \hline
**3** & [58] & 2018 & 97 & Food waste & Literature review \\ \hline
**4** & [59] & 2019 & 89 & \begin{tabular}{c} Food delivery \\ services \\ \end{tabular}  & Web mining techniques \\ \hline
**5** & [36] & 2012 & 85 & \begin{tabular}{c} Sustainable food \\ logistics \\ management \\ \end{tabular}  & Literature review \\ \hline
**6** & [60] & 2019 & 80 & Traceability & Blockchain technology \\ \hline
**7** & [44] & 2006 & 76 & \begin{tabular}{c} Sustainable food \\ procurement \\ \end{tabular}