A Comprehensive Literature Review of the ERP research field

During the past decade ERP has attracted attention from both academic and industrial communities (Shehab, Sharp et al. 2004)

and we feel that now is an opportune time for the ERP field to ask how the field has evolved and what its present state is (Chen

and Hirschheim 2004). The purpose of this paper is to address these questions, which is done by providing an overview of the

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) research field regardless of research discipline, research topic and research traditions. Abstracts

from 723 peer-reviewed journal publications from 2000 up till 2007 have been analyzed according to journal, authors and

year of publication, and further categorized into research discipline, research topic and methods used. The paper demonstrates

that the body of academic knowledge about ERP systems has reached a certain level of maturity and several different research disciplines

have contributed to the field from different points of view using different methods, showing that the ERP research field

is very much an interdisciplinary field. Further it demonstrates that the number of ERP publications has decreased remarkably,

that many different authors have contributed with few publications and that journals publishing ERP papers have changed significantly

since 2000. The paper suggests that publications about ERP have been driven by an interest into an empirical phenomenon

which has declined over time, more than it indicates that a new research discipline has evolved. The findings and suggestions can

be used in future studies about how research fields with interest in an empirical phenomenon, e.g. CRM and ITIL, evolve and as

a guide for researchers providing them with insight into what has been published, where to publish ERP-related research and how

to study it. Contribution of figures and numbers and with an End-Note-database1 containing bibliographical data to be used in

future research.