Decision tools: A systematic literature review, co-citation analysis and future research directions

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide an extensive analysis of contributions to scholarly research on decision tools. Design/methodology/approach: A systematic literature review was used to collect data from 47 articles published in peer-reviewed academic journals between 1980 and 2017. Co-citation analysis was adopted to analyse recent trends in research on decision tools and recommend a framework that places such research into three categories: mature, intermediate and nascent. Findings: The research revealed that a majority of the studies on decision tools describe decision tool implementation in a single company or setting. It also provided a clear presentation of recent trends in the decision tools literature by categorising and comparing papers according to various salient features. The study of decision tools is classified into four macro clusters: conceptualising and defining decision tools; exploring the implementation of decision tools; understanding the relationship between decision tools and other disciplines/approaches/initiatives; and discovering the outcomes of decision tools. Furthermore, the framework proposed in this paper will help scholars identify issues that merit additional theory-building and/or theory-testing research. Originality/value: To the authors’ awareness, this is the first paper to have adopted both a systematic literature review and co-citation analysis to identify the dominant trends and significant gaps in the field of decision tools research.