Radio frequency identification (RFID): research trends and framework

With the rapidly decreasing price of the RFID tag, its adoption and utilisation is increasing swiftly in various contexts including organisations for supply chain management, hospitals for various types of uses and other public sector organisations. Inline with its rapid adoption, researchers from various academic fields are investigating development and management related issues. Nowadays, RFID is popularly known as a technology for the automatic identification by radio frequency of physical objects and people. Therefore, a large number of studies have appeared but scattered in a number of unrelated publishing outlets which may hamper the use of such published resources. This provided us with motivation to analyse the existing research for categorising and synthesising it in a meaningful manner. Hence, the aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive and systematic survey of the literature pertaining to RFID related research issues in order to ascertain the current ‘state of play’ of the field along a number of dimensions. The following research objectives were proposed to achieve the stated aim: (1) to analyse the distribution/trends of RFID research across subject category, source titles (journals), geographical locations, document types and year of publications; (2) to determine the frequently published authors and productive institutions for conducting RFID related research; (3) to explore the trend of topics/research issues and utilised methods; and finally (4) to synthesise the existing research to develop a research model/framework that reflects current status and trends of RFID research and may guide the practitioner for implementing and managing RFID applications in both public and private sectors. Information on a series of variables were extracted after conducting a review of 666 articles on RFID related issues, published in various source titles/journals from different subject categories (such as operations management, and information systems) between 1984 and 2007. Results of this research may have implications for both private and public sector organisations interested in implementing RFID, researchers, journal editors, reviewers and universities.