2. Methodology
The sources of information required for the present research consist of a group of
specialized journals considered likely to include works in the reverse logistics field.
We have excluded proceedings and doctoral theses, in the understanding that quality
studies tend to be published in this type of journal eventually and in addition these
publications are the most cited in scientific papers. In this point we coincide with the
majority of previous studies carried out at the international level (Stahl et al. 1988,
Bairam 1994).
The next step was to select the scientific journals that would be considered in this
study. We opted to select the most prestigious publications in the area of Business
Management and for this we made use of the list of journals published by ISI Journal
of Citation Reports (2004). Among the various topics used by this classification,
we chose the subject categories ‘Business’, ‘Management’ and ‘Operations Research
and Management Science’, which we felt would be the most likely to include journals