Theoretical and empirical advances in the assessment of productive efficiency since the introduction of DEA: a bibliometric analysis

The field of productivity and efficiency analysis is growing exponentially, both in terms of new methods and approaches proposed to assess the efficiency of productive decision making units (DMUs), and in terms of innovative and traditional empirical application of existing methods. This survey provides a bibliometric investigation on the advances of the data envelopment analysis (DEA) from the seminal work of Charnes et al. (1978) to the most recent empirical and theoretical contributions. The most influential authors, outlets, contributions and frontier models are investigated through a timeline-based mapping and distance-based clusters of the state-of-the-art in the field of productivity and efficiency analysis with the support of the analytic tools CitNetExplorer and VOSviewer. The visualisation of the DEA relevant extensions is presented with the identification of application gaps and the evaluation of so far proposed methodologies based on a network of co-citations and bibliometric coupling. We provide a valuable reference for researchers to understand and overview potential advances in this field.