Synthetic Composite Indicators for Monitoring Changes in Countries’ Development Rankings – A Bibliometric Analysis

The paper focuses on bibliometric analysis of the key topic of composite indicators, having in view their growing importance in worldwide scientific researches and debates, mainly due to their potential in providing a relevant picture of multidimensional phenomenon and serving as a valuable tool for policy makers, including at the level of global or continental international organizations. The applications of composite indicators have been extended in wide-ranging fields, from public and economic governance, competitiveness, business management and performance, risk assessment, trade, agriculture to, more recently, sustainable development, international comparisons and country rankings, gentrification, environment and waste management, energy and alternative fuels, climate changes, COVID-19 and other diseases, security. A particular attention of our analysis has been paid to comparisons between countries, by their updating on a regular and standardized basis, monitoring changes in their rank, and benchmarking the mutual and relative progress in a variety of domains to capture a comprehensive image on the relative progress over time of countries. This way, it becomes easier to understand the main determinants of different countries, like EU ones, in terms of development and the advance of real convergence. Even if the bibliometric analysis was performed using the publishing information only from the Web of Science database between 1978 and August 2022, the paper findings highlighted many features valid for the entire international literature on this topic, among these: the publications have grown exponentially (out of the 3190 papers counted in the investigated period, 94% have been published after 2005 and more than 75% after 2010), the highest number of the publications were written by European-affiliated authors, and the top of funding organizations is led by the European Commission.