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The purpose of this paper is to investigate core themes in the quality management research area through a quantitative analysis of research papers published in the journal Total Quality Management and Business Excellence. The study analyses the bibliographies in the published papers in addition to conventional literature reviews. The methodologies applied include bibliometrics and social network techniques. The analysis shows relationships between different publications and the developments over three periods. Core research themes are found to be service quality measurement, customer satisfaction, total quality management (TQM) implementation and effects. Emerging themes are also identified and include establishing customer relations and perceived quality of service, quality cost, comparison studies and empirical studies of TQM effects. The development of the research themes over the three pre-defined periods is also discussed.
Lo et al. (Fri,) studied this question.