In order to discover the current studies and future trends of DEA research, we further investigated the keywords of journal articles published in the last two years (2015 and 2016). To reflect the current studies we list, in Table 3, the top 5 most popular research keywords appeared in the DEA-related articles published in the last two years.
Table 3. Top 5 most popular research keywords in 2015 and 2016.
| No | Research keywords |
|---|---|
| 1 | Eco-efficiency, undesirable outputs, directional distance function (DDF), environmental efficiency, carbon dioxide emissions, pollution, sustainable development, sustainability, environmental protection |
| 2 | Network DEA, two-stage DEA, efficiency Decomposition |
| 3 | Benchmarking |
| 4 | Bootstrap, bootstrapping |
| 5 | Returns to scale, scale efficiency |
Next, we further list, in Table 4, the top 5 latest application fields of DEA with the greatest numbers of journal articles, including Agriculture, Banking, Supply Chain, Transportation, as well as public policy.
Table 4. Application fields of DEA methodology in 2015 and 2016.
| No. | Application field |
|---|---|
| 1 | Agriculture |
| 2 | Banking |
| 3 | Supply chain |
| 4 | Transportation |
| 5 | Public policy |
