question: Inefficient supply chain management could jeopardize or limit an effective vaccination campaign as well as the immunization programs. As we face a COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and population immunization is the best solution, it is critical to map the vaccine supply chain management to identify risks and opportunities for the Industrial Engineering and Operations Management researchers and practitioners. This paper aims to map the field, applying descriptive bibliometric analysis. The application of a string search in the science index Web of Science resulted in a sample of 808 documents. We used the Bibliometrix R for data processing. The scientific production of the domain has been rising since 2006. The few high productivity authors focus on Health Sciences and Immunology studies even though the results unfold a growing interest by academics from Engineering, Business and Economics, Operations Research, and Management Sciences domains. Vaccine and other health sciences journals are the most productive and present a higher impact. The authors’ keywords dynamics analysis shows a resettling of technical terms as “stabilization” and “formulation” to supply chain management keywords as “logistics”. Evidence points out the need for more Industrial Engineering and Operations Management research to increase vaccine distribution effectiveness. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.