Hungarian professor among the world’s top 10 public procurement researchers

Tünde Tátrai, a professor at the Corvinus University of Budapest, is one of the world’s most prominent authors on public procurement, according to a study published a few months ago in the Journal of Public Procurement, the leading journal of the public procurement profession, which examined the literature published on the subject since the beginning of public procurement research between 1984 and May 2022. The analysis included 640 publications by 1247 authors from the Scopus international research database.  

According to the study, the most significant researcher is Andrei Yakovlev from Harvard University, followed by Michael Essig from the Bundeswehr University in Munich as the second, and Helen Walker from Cardiff University as the third. Tünde Tátrai, researcher at Corvinus, is 10th on the list and the second most influential female researcher in the world in the field of public procurement. Tünde Tátrai has been a professor and researcher at Corvinus University since 1997, currently she is a professor at the Department of Supply Chain Management of the Institute of Operations and Decision Sciences, co-chair of the Professorial Board, a public procurement expert of the European Commission’s Electronic Public Procurement Working Group, and a member of the Public Procurement Authority since 2019.  

The article also names the most important institutions in the “institutional cooperation network for public procurement research”, including Corvinus University of Budapest, which is involved in both EU Horizon and Hungarian OTKA projects in this research area. Research into public procurement is important as it accounts for around  12% of a developed country’s GDP and can cover up to 70% of government spending, according to recent figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The study, led by Abderahman Rejeb, found that public procurement research has grown exponentially since 2009, although institutional collaboration is fragmented. The analysis also identified the five most typical directions of public procurement research, namely innovation, corruption, sustainability, contracts and small and medium-sized businesses, which have been part of the curriculum of the Corvinus Public Procurement Management programme for several years.