Green grain warehousing: bibliometric analysis and systematic literature review

Grain warehousing contributes persistent environmental effects in the food supply chain because of its long-term storage feature and distribution requirements. Thus, it has attracted a number of interdisciplinary researchers to the investigations of green grain warehousing (GGW) over the past decades. This paper presents a valuable comprehensive literature review on the existing publications on this topic via bibliometric analysis and systematic review based on 37 papers obtained from three common international academic databases, namely Web of Science, Scopus, and EBSCOhost. We concluded a framework of existing literature with proposing three macro-themes (energy-saving in transporting, environmental harmony, and green deinsectization) as well as a classification of commonly used methods. The results revealed that (1) the increase in research interests over years was found; (2) there are differences in the attention of GGW among countries. Most of the scholars from developing countries focused more on the green operational technologies or strategies, while most of the scholars from developed countries placed their research focuses on keeping grain quality and developing environment-friendly deinsectization approaches with low emission or chemical alternatives; (3) grain quality started to become the most popular hotspot in recent years; (4) the researchers tended to use more comprehensive methodologies or combined methods to conduct their works. Accordingly, we proposed potential research directions. The contribution of this work is to extend current literature and to offer reference to scholars and practitioners for future research and operation in GGW.