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Introduction
We intend this anniversary article to serve one goal: to provide a brief commentary on developments in the area of agility in humanitarian aid supply chains. Our comments are based on an overview of work published over the past decade in: Supply Chain Management: An International Journal (SCMIJ) ; International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management (IJPDLM) ; International Journal of Operations and Production Management (IJOPM) ; and Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management (JHLSCM) . We hope our comments are useful to doctoral students, scholars and practitioners interested in understanding what questions have been addressed and some unresolved issues in those four Emerald-published journals.
We focus mainly on work published in those journals for pragmatic reasons: the 2014 Journal Citation Reports (JCR) reveals that almost two thirds (64.4 per cent) of Emerald's indexed journal titles have increased in impact factor, representing nearly a 10 per cent rise in the previous year (Emerald website, 2015); and Emerald's business and management collection saw 81 per cent of its business titles including logistics and supply chain management (SCM) journals such as SCMIJ increase their impact factor significantly (Emerald website, 2015). This demonstrates the high demand for these journals by practitioners and managers as well as scholars. The four journals actively encourage dialogue and promote the exchange of knowledge, experience and new ideas between researchers and practitioners in the field of logistics and SCM. Thus, it is our view that the four journals represent an appropriate and sufficient scope for a brief overview commentary on the topic of agility in humanitarian aid supply chains. Nonetheless, we acknowledge that the subject of agility in humanitarian aid supply chains has been well explored in several non-Emerald journals.
It should be noted that this commentary is based purely on our own reading and understanding of work published in the field in those four journals. It is only an overview. We do not pretend to be experts or to have undertaken a comprehensive, rigorous literature review other than the expected due diligence as scholars of humanitarian aid supply chains. For a comprehensive review, see the study by Kunz and Reiner (2012) and Overstreet et al. (2011). That said, we have consecutively organised the commentary into four broad...