  Real-world problems are becoming highly complex and, therefore, have to be
solved with combinatorial optimisation (CO) techniques. Motivated by the strong
increase of publications on CO, 8,393 articles from this research field are
subjected to a bibliometric analysis. The corpus of literature is examined
using mathematical methods and a novel algorithm for keyword analysis. In
addition to the most relevant countries, organisations and authors as well as
their collaborations, the most relevant CO problems, solution methods and
application areas are presented. Publications on CO focus mainly on the
development or enhancement of metaheuristics like genetic algorithms. The
increasingly problem-oriented studies deal particularly with real-world
applications within the energy sector, production sector or data management,
which are of increasing relevance due to various global developments. The
demonstration of global research trends in CO can support researchers in
identifying the relevant issues regarding this expanding and transforming
research area.
