The economic and social importance of the automotive industry explains the need for researching improved ways of organising and managing the diverse processes involved in the production of motor vehicles. Furthermore, the management of supply chains and inter-organisational relations has acquired strategic significance in recent years and has become a key area of research. At the interface between these two fields, this paper adopts a bibliometric viewpoint to analyse the scholarly literature that has addressed the study of supply chains within the specific sphere of the automotive industry. To do so, it has examined the 404 papers on this topic indexed through to 2011 in the Business Source Complete database. This has allowed identifying trends and opportunities related to the what, how and where of research into this matte