Bibliometric Exploration of Lean Manufacturing in the Era of Industry 4.0

Abstract

The accelerating digitalization of industrial systems has reshaped traditional management frameworks, including Lean Manufacturing, and has promoted their convergence with the technologies characteristic of Industry 4.0. This intersection has given rise to what is often termed Lean Digital or Lean 4.0, a perspective that aims to merge process optimization with data-driven and connected environments. Despite the growing interest, the academic landscape surrounding this topic shows a dispersed thematic focus, heterogeneous methodological approaches, and limited consolidation of collaborative and bibliographic patterns. As a result, clarifying research trajectories, influential contributors, and strategic areas of development has become increasingly necessary to strengthen conceptual coherence and support future scientific advances. This paper presents a bibliometric assessment of the literature addressing the digital evolution of Lean Manufacturing, using a corpus of 187 documents gathered from the Scopus database. Through VOSviewer, networks for keyword co-occurrence, co-authorship, co-citation, and institutional collaboration were generated, along with productivity and citation indicators. The results show sustained growth in publications from 2019 onward, with a notable rise in 2024. The terminology most frequently appears in the literature illustrates the close alignment between lean methodologies, Industry 4.0, IoT, big data, and digital transformation. Overall, findings indicate an expanding and interdisciplinary research domain with substantial opportunities for further development. The study offers an updated overview for scholars seeking to understand the theoretical and applied progression of Lean systems in digitally enabled environments.