Benchmarking of best practices: an overview of the academic literature

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to overview the academic literature on benchmarking of best practices tracking the most important articles and understanding the similarity between studies. Design/methodology/approach The most relevant articles were identified using techniques such as the PageRank algorithm and co-citation maps. An analysis of the most relevant articles presents the main concepts, methods and updated discussions on this research field. Findings The analysis of academic output substantiates the increase in the production of articles on this research topic. There were identified two main clusters of co-cited articles, one related to data envelopment analysis (DEA) and other that presents a wide variation of methods for benchmarking. There are important critiques towards the past research on benchmarking of best practices, yet, new DEA approaches seem to address most of the criticized issues. Practical implications From time to time, a review of the literature of a certain field of knowledge is useful for other researchers to identify and organize its main theories, new trends, most relevant works, influent authors and important publications. Originality/value This paper delivers two important values: the updated discussion on benchmarking of best practices, clearing both DEA and non-DEA studies; and the methods adopted to systematically review the literature, which is original on this field of research.