Analysis of the scientific production on scenario planning in the Web of Science from 1983 to 2012

Abstract

The aim of this study was to conduct an evaluation of the scientific literature on scenario planning within the production of the Web of Science - a set of databases known as Science Citation Indexes - in the period between 1983 and 2012, adding up 451 articles. We carried out a bibliometric study, adopting an exploratory perspective of mixed nature: qualitative for the bibliographic part and quantitative, regarding to descriptive statistics. The data analysis showed, on the research subarea for the topic 'management science', an interest of 47% with a total of 212 articles, followed by 'business & economy’ with 91 articles (20.2%) and thirdly the subarea of 'public administration' figures with 68 publications (15.1%). We also observed that 92 journals published papers related to 'scenario planning' during the survey period. The Dutch European Journal of Operation Research published 93 articles, followed by the North American Technological Forecasting and Social Change with 50 articles and the British Journal of the Operational Research Society with 48 publications. We believe that the systematization of the main authors and most cited articles in the field of scenario planning must be useful for advancing and maturing future works on this topic.