Citation lag analysis in supply chain research

Interdisciplinary research is expected to contribute to industrial and economic development. However, due to expansion of knowledge and the fragmentation of research fields, knowledge dissemination among different research fields is rare and we need a methodology for measuring such dissemination and promoting it. In this paper, we introduce a citation lag analysis of inter- and intra-clusters extracted by citation network analysis as a new indicator to represent the speed of knowledge diffusion in subfields of a research field. A case study was performed within supply chain research to investigate knowledge integration among its subfields. Based on the analysis, we discuss knowledge structure and reciprocal influence of subfields in supply chain research. This study contributes to offering a new approach for analyzing and understanding the development of boundary spanning research.