Analysis of Integrated Management Systems research: identifying core themes and trends for future studies

This paper presents an analysis of 123 scientific publications in the Integrated Management System (IMS) domain dating from 2005 to 2015. The objective of this study is to investigate core themes, gaps and trends in the IMS research area. The search was conducted in Scopus and Web of Science databases and the bibliometric analysis was carried out with the support of Microsoft Excel and VOSviewer version 1.6.4. The results showed that the main topics investigated are related to (1) IMS levels of integration; (2) major motivations, benefits and obstacles to operate multiple management systems and (3) models for implementation of IMSs. Moreover, this study highlighted the following opportunities for future research: (1) investigating levels of integration from a long-term perspective, (2) considering what barriers to the audits’ integration may possibly affect the degree of integration; (3) evaluating the results of IMS implementation through objective business results, (4) performing empirical tests of the proposed models to implementation of IMS and (5) analyse whether and how IMSs can contribute to engage companies in the development of environmentally sustainable strategies. The main contribution of this paper is to characterise significant points about emerging research on IMS and assist the development of new studies.