Reverse Logistics in the Digital Era: Trends and Challenges from a Bibliometric Perspective

Reverse logistics originated from different needs and began to emerge as early as the mid-twentieth century. Since then, its importance and relevance have grown significantly.Companies are now dedicating more resources and investment to this process, recognising it as a critical component of the supply chain. Reverse logistics not only contributes to the economic value of goods and services, but also plays a crucial role in environmental management. Although the reverse logistics process involves the management of returned goods and materials in the supply chain and the proper disposal of products, it is important to note that it differs from green logistics. Reverse logistics is primarily concerned with the valorisation and disposal of returned products, whereas green logistics encompasses the measurement of the environmental impacts of logistics processes along the entire supply chain, thus taking a more global approach. With the rapid development of the Internet and the proliferation of e-commerce platforms, product returns have become increasingly common among consumers in recent years. This trend underlines the need to explore the various applications of digitisation in reverse logistics, with the aim of understanding the changes occurred and the modern trends. To achieve this goal, we performed a review of the existing literature to obtain an overview of the topics covered across the years, using a combination of bibliographic/bibliometric tools and keyword analysis. The results were obtained on a sample of 65 articles extracted from the Scopus database by querying with specific terms such as 'Reverse logistics', 'Digitalization', 'Industry 4.0' and 'Smart Technologies'. The review allows to identify the most important authors and papers, the most active countries in the field, as well as to classify the articles by type and year of publication and outline the most debated topics and their relationships. In addition, the study also identifies the trends and technologies that respond to the challenges being faced.