A longitudinal literature network review of contributions made to the academy over the past 55 years of the IJPR

The International Journal of Production Research (IJPR) first issue was published in 1961. This year commemorates the journal’s 55th year anniversary. In celebration of its anniversary, this article aims to comprehensively review the journals overall existence (1961–2017), per decade, by a longitudinal analysis of the literature through a main path analysis, and a bibliometric and social network overview. This paper differentiates from previous IJPR’s studies conducted by focusing on the journal’s social network analysis (SNA) by decades and overall period. This research article classifies leading bibliographic material by using the total number of publications, citations, authors per work, country, author’s affiliation, funding agencies, keywords, co-authorship and the top-10 cited papers (with objectives and contributions), over the previous five decades. In conjunction with utilising SNA, major findings indicate remarkable improvement on authors’ publication due to a strong social network. Furthermore, the results suggest that the improvement of Asian universities on the IJPR is not only a result of a strong social network among authors, but also an active support from national research funding agencies. The collaboration between researchers appears to be evidently rising by an increasing percentage of articles penned by three or more authors and the average number of authors per article published. The main path analysis identifies the 30 milestone papers which constitute the backbone of the knowledge published in the overall IJPR history.