Chapter A bibliometric study of global research activity in relation to the use of partial least squares for policy evaluation

Structural equation modeling (SEM), especially partial least squares path modeling (PLS-PM) has become a mainstream method in many fields of research. In the last years it has been increasingly disseminated in a variety of disciplines. The researchers have been promoting this new statistical methods for the evaluation of policies. Generally, policy evaluation applies evaluation principles and methods to examine the content, implementation or impact of a policy. To better understand and characterize this trend, a bibliometric study of international papers on this subject has been developed in order to describe the use of SEM and PLS-PM approaches in the policy evaluation in the almost last 20 years. A total of 450 articles from 2000 to 2020 have been selected and analyzed in order to discover the research trends in this field and the main dimensions and words related to the terms “decision making” and “SEM-PLS” approach, that are most commonly employed in the scientific literature. The research has been conducted in theWeb of Science from ISI Web of Knowledge database and Scopus database, with the aim of identifying the major themes, authors, areas, types of the sources, titles, years of publication and countries of these publications, as well as the main themes related to the two topic analyze