Socio-Economic Planning Sciences 42 (2008) 151–157 www.elsevier.com/locate/seps Evaluation of research in efficiency and productivity: A survey and analysis of the first 30 years of scholarly literature in DEA
Ali Emrouznejada,Ã, Barnett R. Parkerb, Gabriel Tavaresc a Operations &Information Management, Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK b Graduate School of Business, Pfeiffer University, Charlotte, NC 28209, USA c RUTCOR, Rutgers Centre for Operations Research, Rutgers University, 640 Bartholomew Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854-8003, USA
Available online 4 March 2008
The authors wish to dedicate this compendium of DEA’s historical accomplishments to one of its founders, Professor William W. Cooper
Abstract
Since the original Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) study by Charnes et al. [Measuring the efficiency of decisionmaking units. European Journal of Operational Research 1978;2(6):429–44], there has been rapid and continuous growth in the field. As a result, a considerable amount of published research has appeared, with a significant portion focused on
DEA applications of efficiency and productivity in both public and private sector activities. While several bibliographic collections have been reported, a comprehensive listing and analysis of DEA research covering its first 30 years of history is not available.
This paper thus presents an extensive, if not nearly complete, listing of DEA research covering theoretical developments as well as ‘‘real-world’’ applications from inception to the year 2007.
A listing of the most utilized/relevant journals, a keyword analysis, and selected statistics are presented. r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Data Envelopment Analysis; Bibliography; Survey
1. Introduction
The present bibliography includes most of the references published in the field of Data Envelopment
Analysis (DEA) up to the year 2007. Some publications in 2007 are also listed, but not included in the statistics. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this listing appears to be the most complete source of references on DEA and its applications in measuring the efficiency and productivity of decision making units
(DMUs). The authors hope that this new updated bibliography will assist researchers and other scholars as they develop new frontiers in DEA.
ÃCorresponding author. Fax: +44 121 204 5271.
E-mail addresses: a.emrouznejad@aston.ac.uk (A. Emrouznejad), Barnett.Parker@Pfeiffer.edu (B.R. Parker), rrr@rutcor.rutgers.edu
(G. Tavares).
0038-0121/$ - see front matter r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.seps.2007.07.002 ARTICLE IN PRESS
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The authors wishes to thank all those colleagues who continue to submit copies of their papers at http:// www.deazone.com/bibliography [2], and would appreciate receiving additional DEA-related articles for incorporation into future versions of the bibliography. Due to sheer size and volume, however, it is not possible to guarantee a complete absence of inaccuracies or omission of data. Should you find any error(s), please feel free to report them to the authors at biblio@DEAzone.com.
2. DEA bibliography
In 1995, the website www.DEAzone was created with the hope of including the full set of DEA resources under a single ‘‘umbrella,’’ to be accessed by interested researchers and practitioners. Since then, our DEA bibliography has been regularly updated with the kind support of its many users.
Several other bibliographies have also been reported in the literature, including those of Tavares [3],
Emrouznejad and Thanassoulis [4–6], Seiford [7–8] and Gattoufi et al. [9–10]. In compiling the current bibliography, the authors expanded boundaries by searching a variety of both traditional and newer databases including Science Direct (www.sciencedirect.com), EBSCO (www.ebsco.com), Google