Continuity of Essential Services as an Emerging Challenge for Societal Resilience

Critical infrastructure (CI) business continuity is fundamental in today’s turbulent times. The new trend is the reference to essential services (ES). This paper aims to identify lead topics in the ES area and analyze actions to provide ES business continuity. The goal will be achieved by (1) identifying leading research topics using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, (2) conducting a systematic literature review using VOSviewer, (3) mapping the results obtained, and identifying possibilities for further research. Web of Science, Scopus, and specific keywords were used to select peer-reviewed papers discussing the ES issue. The results showed that, despite the importance of the ES issue, there are few publications related to the business continuity of ES. The work focuses on the relevance of ES to individual entities such as companies, cities, municipalities, and countries. There are also isolated works on ES security, but mainly in cybersecurity. The added value of the article is that it organizes the knowledge related to leading topics in the ES area from a Business, Management, and Accounting perspective and indicates the research areas that require further scrutiny. It is the first comprehensive literature review focusing specifically on ES.