Twenty years of water utility benchmarking: A bibliometric analysis of emerging interest in water research and collaboration

摘要

The research on benchmarking analysis of the water and sewage industry has been expanding over the years. Water utility benchmarking analysis is crucial for mitigating the stress associated with classic issues, including ownership status, deregulation policies, and quality of service. A significant body of literature reviews has focused on the choice of quantitative tools and the issues addressed by studies; thus, the bibliometric analysis method is timely. In this study, bibliometric analysis was employed for the first time to review 142 scientific articles on benchmarking analysis of the water and sewage industry based on the Scopus database during the years 2000-2019. The publication pattern confirms that the total number of related publications increased over the study period. Although the studies are dominated by authors from developed countries and they have a wide range of international collaboration, some authors from developing countries have also been actively publishing in recent years. The findings of research hotspot suggest that more studies should be conducted to address the issues of the water and sewage industry in developing countries. Moreover, a robust method is suggested to be included in the development of modeling frameworks, and it would be interesting to incorporate the undesirable outputs and quality of service. Several determinants of the water industry performance are used in the previous studies but there has been little or no agreement on the relationship between these explanatory variables and water utility's performance. There is no one size fits all and the relationship between determinants and the water utility's performance, to some extent, varies influenced by other nondiscretionary factors. To conclude, this review will benefit scholars and practitioners by providing deeper insight into the publication trend in this field and the research gaps on the issues addressed, particularly in policy and regulation. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.