Using Probabilistic Topic Models to Study Orientation of Sustainable Supply Chain Research

  • Carlos Montenegro
  • Edison Loza-Aguirre
  • Marco Segura-Morales
Conference paper
Part of the Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing book series (AISC, volume 745)

Abstract

Even though the notion of sustainable development calls for an equilibrium among social, environmental and economic dimensions, several studies have suggested that an unbalance exists about the attention given to the three dimensions. Nonetheless, few contributions have demonstrated such unbalance. In this article, we propose a method based on LDA Topic Model, conceived to speed up the analysis of the sustainable orientation of a corpus. To test the procedure, we compared the results obtained using our method against those from a manual coding procedure performed on about ten years of literature from top-tier journals dealing with Sustainable Supply Chain issues. Our results confirm unbalance on research in this field, as they were reported previously. They show that most research is oriented to environmental and economic aspects, leaving aside social issues.

Keywords

Sustainable development LDA topic model Content analysis Monte Carlo method Sustainable supply chain 
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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018

Authors and Affiliations

  • Carlos Montenegro
    • 1
  • Edison Loza-Aguirre
    • 1
    • 2
  • Marco Segura-Morales
    • 1
  1. 1.Departamento en Informática y Ciencias de la ComputaciónEscuela Politécnica NacionalQuitoEcuador
  2. 2.CERAG FRE 3748, CNRS/UGAGrenoble Cedex 9France

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