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Benchmarking of best practices: an overview of the academic literature

Vinicius Ferreira de Castro (Industrial and Systems Engineering Department, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianopolis, Brazil)
Enzo Morosini Frazzon (Industrial and Systems Engineering Department, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianopolis, Brazil)

Benchmarking: An International Journal

ISSN: 1463-5771

Article publication date: 3 April 2017

3109

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to overview the academic literature on benchmarking of best practices tracking the most important articles and understanding the similarity between studies.

Design/methodology/approach

The most relevant articles were identified using techniques such as the PageRank algorithm and co-citation maps. An analysis of the most relevant articles presents the main concepts, methods and updated discussions on this research field.

Findings

The analysis of academic output substantiates the increase in the production of articles on this research topic. There were identified two main clusters of co-cited articles, one related to data envelopment analysis (DEA) and other that presents a wide variation of methods for benchmarking. There are important critiques towards the past research on benchmarking of best practices, yet, new DEA approaches seem to address most of the criticized issues.

Practical implications

From time to time, a review of the literature of a certain field of knowledge is useful for other researchers to identify and organize its main theories, new trends, most relevant works, influent authors and important publications.

Originality/value

This paper delivers two important values: the updated discussion on benchmarking of best practices, clearing both DEA and non-DEA studies; and the methods adopted to systematically review the literature, which is original on this field of research.

Keywords

Citation

Castro, V.F.d. and Frazzon, E.M. (2017), "Benchmarking of best practices: an overview of the academic literature", Benchmarking: An International Journal, Vol. 24 No. 3, pp. 750-774. https://doi.org/10.1108/BIJ-03-2016-0031

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited

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