Blockchain technology in business and supply chain management: A bibliometric analysis of research trends, themes, and collaboration networks (2016–2025)

Blockchain, a distributed ledger technology introduced as the settlement layer of Bitcoin, has become a serious candidate technology for transforming how enterprises coordinate, transact, and build trust across supply chains in little more than a decade. Its promise of tamper-evident, disintermediated record-keeping speaks directly to long-standing problems in operations and supply chain management: traceability, transparency, counterfeiting, and the cost of trust. The resulting research literature has grown rapidly but unevenly and remains fragmented across logistics, information systems, finance, and Industry-4.0 sub-communities. This article synthesizes the principal Scopus- and Web of Science–indexed bibliometric analyses of blockchain in business and supply chain management, together with the field’s most influential foundational and empirical works, to provide engineering and technology-management readers with an integrated, source-transparent map. Following the PRISMA 2020 guidance, twenty-four core studies and foundational works were selected for a structured performance and science-mapping synthesis. The evidence documents a field that took off sharply after 2018: bibliometric corpora range from 431 to 628 documents depending on the database and window, with a distinct business-and-economics stream of 467 Web of Science articles. The United States (113 documents), China (100), and India (88) lead output, with the top ten countries accounting for roughly 87% of the corpus; Sustainability and the International Journal of Production Research are the dominant outlets; and Choi, Sarkis, Gunasekaran, and Queiroz are the most productive authors in terms of publications. Five recurrent thematic clusters—traceability, supply chain finance, collaboration, sustainability, and risk— organize the applied literature, while a parallel business-and-economics structure addresses market efficiency, asset pricing, and monetary theory. The review argues that blockchain research is maturing from technological advocacy toward evidence-based assessment of adoption barriers and Industry-4.0 integration, and sets out an agenda for the next phase of enterprise-focused inquiry.