Contribution and Trend to Quality Research—a literature review of SERVQUAL model from 1998 to 2013

While many past studies focus on service quality research, especially using the "SERVQUAL", little is known about the mechanics of this model. Motivated by the need to gauge the contribution of the SERVQUAL model, this study reviews 367 SSCI and SCI articles that are related to the SERVQUAL model from 1998 to 2013. We identify key factors and conduct a survey to search for related articles in the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Science (WOS) database. Research contributions are measured, ranked, and presented based on quantity and quality metrics. The trends of SERVQUAL model research from our results are discussed. This study shows that the SERVQUAL model was one of the hot research topics by academic researchers and significantly contributed to service quality research.Keywords: SERVQUAL model, service quality, quality research, research contribution1 IntroductionSERVQUAL is the abbreviation used for "Service Quality." The SERVQUAL scale was developed based on the ten requisites of quality service in "Conceptual Model of Service Quality-PZB Method" [1]. In 1988, PZB conducted further research [2] and categorized their findings into five determinants: Tangibles, Reliability, Responsiveness, Assurance, and Empathy as the SERVQUAL scale. It provides a complete scoring system to every industry, to assist management with credibility and efficiency, and to serve the purpose of service improvement.This study differs from traditional literature reviews. Traditional reviews design SERVQUAL scales according to the PZB model and measure the clients' satisfaction of service quality. Our research aims to generalize and probe changes in the research on service quality and the areas of analysis over the past fifteen years (from 1998 to 2013), and to serve as an overview to researchers interested in service quality [3].When choosing references, most researchers value the impact factor as an influential criterion in addition to research methods and theories. We use the ISI WOS database as our major research tool. The ISI WOS database collects all recent papers in the Sciences Citation Index (SCI) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). The metrics for assessing research contribution for academics, departments, journals, and conferences usually have two dimensions: quantity and quality. The quantity can be measured by the number of related publications while the quality can be measured by the number of citations of the papers [4]. A metric that combines quantity and quality into a single number called Hirsch Index has been proposed to measure contribution of a researcher [5].We analyze past SERVQUAL articles with four major perspectives: time (number of articles published and times cited each year), geography (country and research institution), productivity (researchers and journals), and impact (number of citations, research fields, and article characteristics) in preparation for future research.This paper is organized as follows: we discuss our research methods with the scope of study and the metrics of research contribution. The results are presented and discussed based on different factors. We conclude our paper with trends that correlated to our results and future work.2 Research MethodsIn this Section we present our research methods with the scope or our research, and metrics for research contribution.2.1 Scope of the StudyOur study uses keywords to search the ISI WOS database. It includes 367 SERV-QUAL model related articles in 167 SCI and SSCI journals. The result shows that there is an increasing interest in the area of service quality (Figure 1). In particular, the number of articles and the number of citations suddenly increased between 2009 and 2011. Since then, the number of articles on the follow-up discussion regarding this topic has dropped marginally but the times cited have increased. Thus, it can be seen that service quality remains a significant research area among service-related articles. …