Empirical Surveys of Frontier Applications: A Meta-Review <s> Systematic Search <s> This paper presents a review of the extensive literature concerned with estimating production and cost inefficiencies in banks. The meaning of inefficiency in this context is outlined, alternative estimation techniques are summarised and the problems of modelling the activities of banks and measuring their inputs and outputs are discussed. By including more non-US studies than previous surveys, the paper produces a more comprehensive summary and comparison of inefficiency results than has previously been attempted. The paper ends with a set of recommendations for future researchers in the area. <s> BIB001 </s> Empirical Surveys of Frontier Applications: A Meta-Review <s> Systematic Search <s> This paper presents the results of a sawing simulation study examining the effects of the rotational orientation of the log and the depth of the opening cut on the value of hardwood lumber produced with 1995 and 2004 lumber prices. First, three-dimensional virtual logs were reconstructed on the computer using computed tomography (CT) images of seven red oak logs. To determine the optimal opening cut face, simulations of live sawing 4/4-inch lumber were conducted by rotating the virtual logs at 15-degree increments and increasing the cutting depth for the opening face in 1/16-inch increments. Results suggest that rotational orientation and depth of the opening cut significantly affect the value of lumber produced. The optimal rotational orientation and opening position outperformed the mean of 432 possible combinations by 19.5 percent with the 1995 lumber prices. With the 2004 lumber prices, the gain was 14.7 percent. With either set of prices, a combination of the right rotational orientation and a random opening cut depth increased the value of lumber produced by 5 percent over the mean of 432 possible combinations, and 8 percent when the depth chosen was within 1/8 inch of the optimum. On the other hand, with either set of prices a combination of the optimal opening cut depth and a random rotational angle resulted in no gain over the mean value derived for the 432 combinations. This improved to 6 percent with the 1995 lumber prices and 4 percent with the 2004 lumber prices as the control for rotational orientation improved to within 30 degrees of the optimum. When both the rotational orientation of the log and the depth of the opening cut were jointly considered, with the 1995 lumber prices the gain increased from 3.6 to 5.7 percent over the average of all 432 combinations as control over the rotational orientation and opening depth improved from within 30 degrees and 1/8 inch to 15 degrees and 1/16 inch, respectively. Similarly, with the 2004 lumber prices, the gain increased from 2.9 to 4.4 percent. As such, early log scanners need not be highly precise to deliver significant value to hardwood sawmills that adopt this technology. <s> BIB002 </s> Empirical Surveys of Frontier Applications: A Meta-Review <s> Systematic Search <s> The efficiency and productivity of the wood products manufacturing sector have been evaluated by many researchers. Productivity growth compensates for price increases and enhances competitiveness. Technical efficiency, which is the efficiency of converting inputs to outputs, directly affects costs and consequently profits and capital investments. Considering the importance of efficiency and productivity studies, this paper provides an introduction to performance assessment approaches and reviews the literature on productivity and efficiency studies of the Canadian wood industry. It concludes that further research in this area may develop by incorporating factors and aspects specific to the wood industry and including desirable and undesirable outputs of the production process into the models. Comparative analyses with other regions and temporal efficiency studies can also help in evaluating and monitoring the performance of wood producers in Canada and identifying improvement policies. <s> BIB003
The project started in 2015 and has been progressively developed since then by meetings and consultations to specialized literature. 1 The last systematic search has been performed on September 1, 2018, at 2:52 pm (UTC−03:00). The main results have been extracted from the system at 6 pm of the same day, and the subjective assessment on each abstract was made in the days following the initial collection. The search was executed on the Scopus web system, which contains the largest database of peer-reviewed scientific literature, using the search engines provided by the website. Titles, abstract and keywords on review articles since 1978 (the year of Charnes et al. DEA seminal paper) to 2019 have been checked by the query strings produced with a combination of keywords from a starting list of 104 surveys. This expert database of surveys was selected prior by the team of authors to produce a network of co-occurring terms with high density. The densest terms were selected to compose the strings applied in the refinement procedure to track additional relevant surveys on empirical frontier assessments of various kinds. The descriptions on each of these queries are present in the Table 2 , and the flow diagram in Figure 1A (see Appendix) synthetizes the stages of this process. The density of the most prominent terms is designed by considering the keywords incidence in the empirical surveys and their interaction with other relevant keywords: the larger these metrics, the greater the potential representativeness by the keywords combinations in the queries. Figure 1 reports the most prominent terms as a density map of the relevant keywords extracted from the departing bibliography list by the first systematic search performed on January 13, 2017. Based on these indicators of query's representativeness, the purpose is to depart from the broader set of items to end up with the narrow relevant keywords, with no imposed threshold on the number of occurrences to be detected. A total of 243 keywords' terms emerged with at least one occurrence. From this network, 42 items are regarded as independent, in which case the item does not bring any significant contribution to design applicable queries and identify pertinent empirical surveys. Thus, the largest set of interconnected keywords consists of 201 items framed in the density map depicted in the Figure 1 . The most relevant keywords from those items are contrasted as hot-spot concentrations where both the information with regard to the occurrences and their interaction among the documents are taken into consideration. The keywords 'efficiency' with 26 occurrences and 106 links, 'data envelopment analysis' with 19 occurrences and 84 links, 'review' with 14 occurrences and 59 links, 'stochastic frontier analysis' with 7 occurrences and 44 links, and 'benchmarking' with 19 occurrences and 84 links are some of the most dense and relevant terms identified in the keywords mining process. Other potential applicable expressions with a greater incidence and link connections are not taken into consideration for being included as search results in the results of more restricted keywords. Examples are the expressions 'technical efficiency', 'efficiency measurement', 'frontier efficiency analysis' in which search results are already included in the results when the keyword 'efficiency' is applied. Other applicable keywords such as 'dea' and 'sfa' when enforced in queries' combinations result in surveys that are not related to the efficiency analysis field (though they are referenced as acronyms, for instance, 'dielectric analysis' referring to 'dea' or 'surface forces apparatus' referring to 'sfa').  (TITLE-ABS-KEY (efficiency) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY (data AND envelopment AND analysis) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY (stochastic AND frontier AND analysis) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY (benchmarking ) ) AND DOCTYPE ( re ) AND (EXCLUDE (SRCTYPE , "d") OR EXCLUDE (SRCTYPE , "k") OR EXCLUDE (SRCTYPE , "p") OR EXCLUDE (SRCTYPE , "b") OR EXCLUDE (SRCTYPE , "Undefined" ) ) AND (LIMIT-TO (LANGUAGE , "English") ) The terms 'efficiency', 'data envelopment analysis', 'stochastic frontier analysis' and 'benchmarking' applied in the query string Q1 (Table 2) bring 58,082 document results. The refinements described by the queries Q2, Q3 and Q4 limit the results to English written reviews with specific keywords in the abstract of the document (see Table 2 for a clearer understanding of the related systematic search). 955 reviews were identified as outcome of the systematic process. After a meticulous analysis on each paper, 106 documents were selected as prominent empirical reviews on frontier efficiency assessments, of which 84 were already included in our prior departing bibliography list of empirical surveys. Thereby, 22 empirical reviews have been added to the 104 empirical reviews from the starting list, yielding a total of 126 final relevant empirical surveys. Thus, 84.12% of empirical surveys were identified by the systematic search (106 surveys) and 15.88% added by expert knowledge (20 surveys). There may be plenty of reasons why these 20 surveys were not detected by the systematic search. Some such as BIB003 and BIB002 belong to journals that are not indexed in the SCOPUS bibliography base. Other surveys in the departing list were published prior, after or in between the Scopus coverage years for the specific journal. For instance, BIB001 was published in 2000, while the coverage years for the Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics comprehend the period from 2004 to 2018. Other departing surveys (such as  ) are book chapters, handbooks or notes that, despite their relevance, cannot be found in the database. In addition, it is still possible that some of the important surveys were missed during the refinements. The search strings are not perfect; they need constant updates with the great amount of information and publications that have been daily added in the scientific literature.