Bibliometric Analysis of Product-Service System Related to Life Cycle

Christina Wirawan

Industrial Engineering Department, Maranatha Christian University, Prof. Drg Suria Sumantri 65, Bandung, Indonesia

Keywords: Bibliometric Analysis, Life Cycle, Product-Service System, Sustainability.

Abstract: The product-service system (PSS) concept is a concept that offers an alternative consumption pattern by

shifting the consumption of tangible products into one product and service bundle. This concept appears to

address the sustainability problem. In a company, the PSS concept is closely related firm life cycle. This paper

aims to provide an overview of the bibliometric literature on PSS in terms of the life cycle. The methodology

used is a bibliometric literature review and article mapping using VOSviewer software. The articles studied

Scopus indexed articles, found on scopus.com based on the keywords 'product-service system' and 'life cycle'.

From the results of the research conducted, it can be concluded that the articles were originally in the field of

product development as well as product and service developed towards industrial management and

competitive advantage. This study provides an appropriate basis for further research and a research road map

on 'product service systems' related to 'life cycles'. By mapping the bibliometric, researchers can find out what

areas need to be further developed. Further research can be conducted with recent articles to always track the

dynamics of the research related.

1 INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, human consumption patterns can be

divided into 2 groups, namely overconsumption and

under consumption (Mont, 2002). Both groups are

burdensome to the environment. Overconsumption,

usually done by the prosperous people, namely the

pattern of consumption of goods more than what is

needed (Mont, 2002) so that it wastes existing

resources. Meanwhile, under-consumption is usually

carried out by underprivileged people, who exploit

natural resources unwise and cause damage to the

environment (Mont, 2002).

As the human population continues to increase, if

these two patterns are ignored, in the next few

decades it will result in a lack of productivity. This

deficiency occurs due to the use of large amounts of

energy and materials for making tangible goods,

which are natural resources. This condition

threatening sustainability. However, since the early

1980s, people have started to aware of sustainability.

Sustainability is viewed from three aspects, namely

economic, environmental and social (Elkington,

2004). With this awareness of sustainability, there

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4273-7820

needs to be a breakthrough that can save resource

consumption.

A strategy that can be implemented to save

resource consumption is the concept of a product-

service system (PSS). This concept offers a change in

consumption patterns from tangible goods (products)

to packages consisting of tangible goods (products)

and services (services) (Goedkoop, Halen, Riele, &

Rommens, 1999; Mont, 2002). In this concept, the

consumption of tangible goods is shifted to services

wherever possible without sacrificing the

performance and benefits provided to customers

(Baines et al., 2007; Mont, 2002; Tukker, 2004).

Implementing PSS can decrease the consumption of

tangible goods, protect the environmental burden, and

offer the entrepreneur a new business model. Thus,

PSS can encourage sustainability.

In the context of maintaining sustainability, PSS

needs to be linked to the life cycle. PSS can be used

to manage life cycles by varying the bundle of

products and services and shift to more services. Then

in turn it is helping to extend sustainability as well.

Until now, research on PSS has been done by

many researcher (such as Baines et al., 2007;

Goedkoop et al., 1999; Mont, 2002; Tukker, 2004 and

110

Wirawan, C.

Bibliometric Analysis of Product-Service System Related to Life Cycle.

DOI: 10.5220/0010745000003112

In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Emerging Issues in Humanity Studies and Social Sciences (ICE-HUMS 2021), pages 110-118

ISBN: 978-989-758-604-0

many more). Research on PSS is increasing over time

in terms of quantity and from related areas. The life

cycle concept also a mature concept and applied to

product (Hill, Jones, & Schilling, 2015; Cao & Folan,

2012), industry (Karniouchina, Carson, Short, &

Ketchen, 2013; Tavassoli, 2015), organization or

company (Jawahar & McLaughlin, 2001; Hasan,

2018; Bakarich, Hossain, & Weintrop, 2019).

In addition, there are many articles relating PSS to

the life cycle. Several articles related PSS with

product life cycle design (such as Doualle et al., 2016;

Mourtzis, Doukas, & Fotia, 2016; Haber, Fargnolli

and Sakao, 2016; etc.), product life cycle

management and improvement (such as Lindkvist &

Sundin, 2016; Patala et al., 2016; Kambanou, 2020;

etc.), PSS life cycle engineering (such as Berkovich,

Krcmar, & Leimester, 2011; Sousa-Zomer,

Magalhae, Zancul, & Cauchick-Miguel, 2017;

Zhang, Ming, & Yin, 2020; etc.), PSS life cycle

assessment (Kambanou, & Lindahl, 2016; Banerjee,

& Punekar, 2020; Bonilla-Alicea et al., 2020; etc),

and PSS life cycle customer needs (Annarelli,

Battistella, & Nonino, 2020; Kim, 2020; Liu et al.,

2020; etc.) and many more. With the variety of

research areas regarding PSS related to the life cycle,

it is necessary to have a study that shows the

conditions of these studies. This research will be

useful for researchers who will continue or seek new

fields related to the PSS area and the life cycle.

But an article about bibliometric and map

generated to describes the position of existing articles

related to PSS and life cycle not found. The

bibliometric analysis had not been found for PSS

areas, even more related to life cycle area. Therefore,

this article aims to fill in the research gap by

providing an extensive bibliometric analysis of the

PSS related to life cycle literature. Bibliometric

analysis conducted based on articles published and

indexed by Scopus using VOSviewer software.

This article benefit researcher to view the map of

the current articles related to PSS and life cycle and

find further research. Further research hopefully can

develop the area of PSS and life cycle which can

encourage sustainability.

2 METHODS (AND MATERIALS)

Related to the background, the research questions are:

What is the current map of Scopus indexed articles

related to PSS and the life cycle? What areas are

related to PSS and the life cycle that has developed a

lot and which are not yet? Then, what research

opportunities could be undertaken to fill in the gaps

and develop this area.

This article conducted the bibliometric study by

mapping and analysing scientific articles that have

been published or in press. The topic to be mapped

and analysed in this study is PSS related to life cycles.

The method used in this research is a five-stage

method (Hudha et al., 2020) as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Bibliometric analysis steps (Hudha et al., 2020).

As at figure 1, following are the explanation about

each step.

1 Determine Search Keyword

This is the first step of the research. In this step, I use

the source of the articles analysed and the keyword

used to search the articles. To ensure good quality

articles that analysed, the articles search from the

scopus.com website.

The keyword used is related to PSS and the life

cycle. Then, the literature search was conducted on

17 November 2020 at the scopus.com website, using

TITLE-ABS-KEY (“product-service system” OR

“product service system” OR “PSS”) AND TITLE-

ABS-KEY (“life cycle” OR “life-cycle”) keyword.

2 Initial Search Results

As mentioned before, literature search were Scopus

indexed articles. It is found that the articles range

from the year 2001 to 2021. At first search, 626

articles found. Then, I go to the next step, refinement

of search results.

3 Refinement of Search Results

To improve the results, the refinement of the search

conducted. The refinement is done by excluding:

● Non-English articles

● Review and conference review type articles

● Unrelated area: agriculture and biological science,

chemical, biochemical, medicine, nursing,

pharmacology, toxicology and pharmaceutical,

earth and planetary science, physic and

astronomy, chemical engineering and health

professions

● Lecture notes

● Retracted article

After the refinement, there are 503 articles left for

further analysis. The results are saved in Research

Information Systems (RIS) format including article’s

titles, authors, authors’ affiliations, keywords,

abstracts, and citations for further analysis.

Bibliometric Analysis of Product-Service System Related to Life Cycle

111

4 Compile Data Statistics

The data of the articles collected from the refinement

of search results steps, then converted to Microsoft

Excel, while checked for the completeness and

accuracy of the information. If necessary, data from

google scholar also added to improve the database.

The data tabulated and analysed to find the spread

according to the year of publication, citation number,

and articles number per journal or proceeding.

5 Data Analysis

The bibliometric analysis in this study employed

descriptive statistical. However, to analyse and

visualise bibliometric networks, VOSviewer software

is used (Martínez-López, Merigó, Gázquez-Abad, &

Ruiz-Real, 2020; Shukla, Merigó, Lammers, &

Miranda, 2020). VOSviewer also help to create

publication maps, author maps, or journal maps based

on co-citation networks or to build keyword maps

based on shared networks (Hudha et al., 2020).

3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Based on the data collected and analysed, we found

the results and following we discussed the results.

3.1 Publications and Citations

Structure

The statistical analysis results of the articles discussed

PSS related to life cycle are shown at table 1 to table

4 and figure 2.

Table 1: Data of articles related to PSS and Life Cycle

indexed by Scopus.

As can be seen in Table 1, we found that the first

publication indexed by Scopus about PSS related to

life cycle is at 2001 in total 3 publications, while

publication not indexed by Scopus found at 1999

(Goedkoop et al., 1999). From Table 1. it can be seen

that from 2001-2021 there were 503 articles

published in Scopus indexed documents (book, book

chapter, journal and proceeding) discussing PSS

related to life cycles. For articles in 2021 are still in-

press status and there are 2 articles recorded. Of these

503 articles, the average citation per article quite high

reaches 14.7 citations and an average number of

citations 351.2 per year. This information indicates

that these articles are of high quality and that the

science in this field is produced and developed during

these periods. So that, it can be concluded that the

discussion of this area is suitable.

Table 2 and figure 2 show the distribution of

articles published yearly for each type of

publications. Most of the publications are in the form

of proceedings, shown that many conferences held

related to the topic. This indicated that this topic

could interest the authors.

Table 2: Number of publications spread by year of

publication and type.

The topic of PSS is relatively new because it only

started around 1999, so it can be seen that in the early

2000s there were still few articles published but there

is an increasing trend. Started in 2006 the number was

incrementally increased and was quite stable until it

experienced a sharp increase in 2013 and a spike

occurred in 2016.

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Figure 2: Publication distribution diagram by year and type of publication.

Table 3: Top ten cited articles.

This surge most of the proceedings, with the

implementation of quite some conferences on this

topic in 2016. In 2017 the articles decreased when

compared to the spike in 2016, but when compared to

2015 it increased and tended to be stable until 2019.

Even though in 2017 the number of articles

decreased, However, the number of articles in

journals is increasing because there have been many

studies and writings that have solidified experts for

publication in journals. For 2020 proceedings

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decreased drastically, due to the Covid-19 pandemic

which prevented the conference from being held.

Another cause could also be a pandemic hindering the

conduct of research, so the completion schedule was

postponed. In addition, the Covid pandemic has also

affected the speed and time accuracy of journal

publishing.

Another explanation about the decreasing amount

of publications in the development of the PSS area

was going to other many areas besides the life cycle

so that the research and articles spreading to many

areas.

The most cited articles are shown in table 3. These

articles can be considered as "key articles" in the field

of PSS related to life cycles. They should be had a

good quality as well as high novelty so that many

other researchers have cited them. By knowing this

information, these articles can be taken into

consideration to read earlier if the researcher wants to

study PSS related to life cycles.

Next is information about journals and

proceedings that mostly publish PSS articles related

to life cycles as in table 4. In this table, it can be seen

that Procedia CIRP contains the largest number of

articles related to the topic of PSS and life cycles,

followed by the Journal of Cleaner Production. This

information can be a reference for researchers who

want to find or publish their work with appropriate

topics.

Table 4: Top journals or proceedings published articles

under PSS related to life cycle area.

3.2 VOSviewer Mapping Results based

on Topic Areas

The database of articles analysed using VOSviewer

software. The articles downloaded from scopus.com

stored at RIS files. The RIS file is then uploaded to

VOSviewer with the following steps: Create - Create

a map based on bibliography data - Read data from

reference manager file - RIS, select the file - Type

analysis: co-occurrence - Counting method: full

counting - Next – Next.

After done these steps, VOSviewer shown the

keywords detected by VOSviewer. The next step is to

observe keywords. If there are keywords that have a

similar mean, then the keywords are combined with

the help of a thesaurus file. Thesaurus file can be

generated by making two column file, label and

replaced by, then convert the file to txt file.

Furthermore, some general or irrelevant keywords are

excluded. In this study, the keywords "3d printers",

"article" and "priority journal" were excluded.

Visualization generated by VOSviewer can be

seen in figure 3. This figure shows the relationship

Figure 3: Map of articles related to life cycle and PSS.

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Figure 4: Overlay visualization.

Figure 5: Distribution and relationship of authors for PSS related to life cycle.

keywords, described by lines. The circle size

represented the amounts of articles find. The small

circle represented keywords with the small number of

articles found. On the contrary, a big circle

represented keywords with the large number of

articles found. The two biggest circles related to PSS

and life cycle are product development and design.

The figure also shows clusters formed,

represented with different colours. In this picture, the

keywords are divided into 7 clusters, represented by

each colour. Each cluster, represented keywords that

usually used together in articles. The cluster elements

formed can be seen in table 5. From table 5, we can

find each cluster’s topics describe topics that usually

related to research by the researcher.

Figure 4. shows a similar map to figure 3, but in

this figure, the map shows the years of publication is

due. This map shows the history of the emergence of

this topic and then its development into other topics.

By knowing this distribution, researcher can trace

the origin of topics and can also search for the latest

topics.

Figure 5 shows the distribution of authors and

their relation to other authors. This description helps

future researchers to find key authors in related

topics. This knowledge help author to trace the

articles and find the thought of the authors to ease

future researchers to compare the thoughts and find

novelties.

Figure 6 shows the distribution of authors

calculated from the time of publication. This map

helped researchers to trace the author's activity and

the history of their thoughts. This knowledge help

researchers to follow the thoughts then find their own.

4 CONCLUSIONS

From the results of research conducted, it can be

concluded that articles published and indexed by

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Table 5: Cluster elements formed.

Figure 6: Distribution and relationship of authors for PSS related to life cycle by years.

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Scopus from 2001-2021 with the topic "product-

service system" and "life cycle" have been found.

From the year the article was published, it can be

seen, in general, the initial topic was about product

development and product and service that developed

towards industrial management and competitive

advantage. Then the environmental impact develops

on the other hand, which develops into sustainability

and sustainable development.

After that, interrelated and emerged PSS, life

cycle, decision making which then evolved into life

cycle management, cost, and maintenance. The topics

that were then raised were life cycle costing, business

models, big data, IoT, industry 4.0 and quality

function deployment. The last topics are topics that

are still a little-publicized so that they still open up

opportunities for further researcher.

Other topics that people have written about the life

cycle and PSS for a long time also still have the

opportunity to be researched, considering that the

circle is not too big and has something to do with the

life cycle and PSS. Other research opportunities can

also be searched by linking topics that are not

currently related.

Further, this article can be used by researchers as

a base to do a literature review, state of the art, as well

as to find novelties and research ideas. To keep on up

to date, this article needs to be upgraded periodically

due to the fast addition articles at scopus.com.

The limitation of this research is that it only takes

data from scopus.com because it wants to make sure

the articles analysed are good articles. But actually,

there are other articles that are not included in

Scopus.com, for example on the Web of Knowledge,

Google Scholar, and others. Therefore, for future

research, articles from more sources can be taken.

Another thing that is also a limitation is that this

bibliometric analysis is carried out in 2020, so it takes

data on articles that have been published or will be

published until November 17, 2020. Meanwhile, the

articles published will definitely continue to grow

over time, so bibliometric analysis is also necessary.

constantly updated to get the latest condition maps.

There will always be opportunities for future research

to carry out bibliometric analysis.

In addition, this study only discusses research

areas related to PSS and the life cycle. Future research

can be done by discussing other topics related to PSS,

such as sustainability, product design, big data, and

others.

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