Have you ever tried to find the most cited paper in supply chain management research? I have done so. For this purpose, I used the term “supply chain” in Web of Knowledge for a topic search. The winning paper is titled Information distortion in a supply chain: The bullwhip effect and the authors are Hau L. Lee, V. Padmanabhan, and Seungjin Whang. The paper was published in Management Science in 1997 and has since been cited more than 1,000 times. Being a milestone for our field, the paper analyzes four sources of the bullwhip effect, and it discusses actions to be taken to mitigate the detrimental impact of the bullwhip effect. The bullwhip effect is one of only a few theories that explicitly refer to our system, the “supply chain”. It is hard to believe: The second most cited paper was written by the same authors. I express my respect for their outstanding performance.

Lee, Hau L., Padmanabhan, V., & Whang, Seungjin (1997). Information distortion in a supply chain: The bullwhip effect. Management Science, 43 (4), 546-558 https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.43.4.546