A bibliometric analysis of Quality 4.0: current status, trends and future research directions

Purpose This review paper aims to explore and investigate the Quality 4.0 current knowledge, emerging areas, and trends available in the literature and provide insights for future research directions. The bibliometric analysis determines the most prominent journals, authors, countries, articles, and themes. The Citation and PageRank analysis identifies the most influential and prestigious articles. The author's keyword analysis identifies the research theme, patterns, and trends within a particular area of research. Design/methodology/approach This study utilised the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis) declaration as a review protocol, and the data is retrieved accordingly. Therefore, 104 articles from Scopus and 28 from Web of Science were combined in R-Environment, and 25 duplicates were removed using RStudio. Finally, 107 papers were selected for further analysis. After the abstract level screening, the study reviewed 99 articles bibliographically published in peer-reviewed journals from prominent academic databases Scopus and WoS between 2011 to April 2023. We used the VOSviewer software tool for analysing bibliometric networks that allow the construction, visualisation, and exploration of maps based on any form of network data. Findings The review identified emerging themes: artificial intelligence, digitalization, sustainability, root cause analysis, topic modelling, and digital voice-of-customers. To establish the intellectual structure of the field and identify gaps, co-citation and content analysis were used. The content of 49 papers in the identified clusters was then carefully analysed. The four primary themes are the relationship of Quality 4.0 with Industry 4.0, the conceptualization of Quality 4.0, recommendations for the new Quality 4.0 model, and the impact of Quality 4.0. The findings provide an excellent foundation for future research in this field for policymakers, managers, practitioners, and academia. Originality/value This is the first systematic literature review-cum-bibliometric analysis on quality 4.0 that covers the field comprehensively. Based on the present review, the paper proposes six possible future research directions to investigate.