Applications of Analytics in Delivery: A Bibliometric Study, 2014-2026

The analysis covers 2,802 documents retrieved from Scopus with the query "Delivery AND Analytics" and published between 2014 and 2027. For RQ1, output rose from 52 documents in 2014 to 544 in 2026, an average growth of 21.6 per cent a year. The path was uneven: output dipped in 2022 and 2023, then more than doubled in 2025. The years 2025 and 2026 hold 38.4 per cent of the set, and 2026 is incomplete. Mean citations fall from 87.4 per paper for 2014 to 1.1 for 2026, because recent papers have had less time to be cited. The median is 7 citations, 549 papers have none, and the top 10 per cent of papers hold 63.3 per cent of all citations, so impact is concentrated in a small set of mostly older work. For RQ2, the field is large and spread out, with 12,328 authors and 1,634 sources. Papers have 4.99 authors on average and only 9.1 per cent are single-authored. The United States accounts for 28.6 per cent of author appearances, India for 11.4 per cent and China for 7.4 per cent. The most productive author labels (Wang Y, Kumar A, Zhang Y) each combine many different people, so author rankings should be read with care. Multi-country papers (30.8 per cent) average 36.3 citations against 22.3 for single-country papers. The gap is statistically significant, though reviews account for part of it. For RQ3, the keyword maps at thresholds of 30, 35 and 40 give the same four clusters: health-care delivery and management, analytics methods and digital technology, clinical and population study terms, and drug delivery with precision medicine. Health care is the core of the field and appears in about six of every ten documents, but its share is falling as logistics and education studies grow. Methods have moved from big data towards machine learning, artificial intelligence and, since 2024, large language models (Bates et al., 2014; Jiang et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2021; Gencer & Gencer, 2025). For RQ4, the main limits come from the export and the search. All cited-reference fields are empty, so co-citation analysis and bibliographic coupling cannot be done. Index keywords are missing for 30.2 per cent of records, and generic indexer labels such as "human" and "article" dominate the maps. The query joins fields that share a word but little else, such as nanoparticle drug carriers and parcel routing, so citation totals and clusters describe the retrieved set rather than one research community. The two 2027 records were kept to match the screening flow, which makes Biblioshiny report a negative growth rate. Recent papers have had less time to gather citations, so their lower counts do not by themselves show lower quality. Within these limits, the counts and maps show how research on delivery and analytics has grown, where it comes from and how its themes have shifted. Later studies would gain from narrower queries for each field of delivery, an export that includes cited references, and conclusions that stay within what the chosen data can support.

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