Digitalization as a way forward: A bibliometric analysis of 20 Years of servitization research

This paper conducts a bibliometric analysis of servitization and PSS by examining 690 selected papers from Web of Science database. Knowledge mapping techniques including collaboration analysis, co-citation analysis and keywords co-occurrence analysis methods are adopted in the bibliometric analysis. Our findings show that China and England are the top two countries publishing more papers, and Sweden, Germany, Switzerland and Denmark keep tight collaboration relationships with other regions. We also find that some active researchers play critical roles as interfaces to connect different research groups in the servitization and PSS fields. Some authors of highly cited papers in earlier years gradually turned to other research directions. In addition, ‘Digital PSS and servitization’, and ‘territorial servitization’ are found to be emerging trends in recent years. Although the earlier sustainability topics in the servitization field are more associated with eco-design and lifecycle extension, they gradually shift to sustainable business models in recent years. Compared with most of the literature reviews in the field, this study provides insights by revealing the distribution structure of literature, the collaboration relationship and the dynamic change of research trends with a transparent, repeatable and objective procedure.