Supplier Selection with Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Methods: Trends in the Literature, Bibliometric Analysis, Future Recommendations

In today’s business world, where global competition is becoming ever more intense, a company’s success depends largely on the strategic partnership it enters into with its suppliers. Viewing relationships with suppliers from a strategic perspective is of great importance for companies in order to expand their long-term competitiveness and achieve sustainable success. In this direction, proper selection and effective management of suppliers play a crucial role in a variety of ranging from financial performance to product quality. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the research trends, development, and future potential research areas of multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods in supplier selection. To this end, existing key topics and gaps in the literature were identified by focusing on research articles in two scientific databases published between 2020 and 2024. The results show that the integration of hybrid approaches and fuzzy logic with MCDM methods delivers significantly reliable results in decision-making processes. In addition, these findings provide theoretical and practical contributions by offering guidance to managers on supplier selection and are a valuable reference source for researchers and practitioners in the field.