Evolution and frontiers of smart supply chain management: an LLM-Enhanced BERTopic analysis

Industry 4.0 is transforming supply chain management (SCM) from linear models into intelligent, collaborative systems. To explore this research frontier, we propose an LLM-enhanced BERTopic framework. Analyzing 8,866 publications from 1997 to 2024, we identified 175 topics and categorized them into four dimensions: digital technologies, operational optimization, resilience, and sustainability. Furthermore, our evolutionary analysis reveals three distinct eras in smart SCM research: the foundational era (1997–2007), the digitization era (2008–2015), and the intelligence era (2016–present). Ultimately, findings indicate that supply chains are evolving into adaptive, intelligent network ecosystems characterized by human-machine collaboration, providing a strategic roadmap for future digital transformation.