In this article, we aim to systematize selected contemporary literature on humanitarian logistics and humanitarian supply chain management (HLSCM), which has attracted a considerable amount of attention from scholars, practitioners and policy makers alike (Kovacs and Spens 2010). Rising interest in this field has been justified by a myriad of humanitarian challenges that society has faced over the past few years (Dubey and Gunasekaran 2015), examples of which include natural disasters and armed conflicts among others. As the subject of humanitarian logistics and supply chain gains more relevance the literature surrounding it has significantly increased, meaning a systematization of this literature now seems appropriate, as does identifying research gaps for future studies. Consequently, the contribution of this article is to provide a systematization of selected contemporary works in the relevant literature on humanitarian logistics and supply chain that have been published by journals indexed in Scopus and Web of Science. Inspired by procedures adopted by highly cited literature reviews (e.g. Lage Junior and Godinho Filho 2010), this paper delivers: • An identification of the main articles on the field of humanitarian logistics and supply chain indexed in Scopus and Web of Science; • A classification of the relevant literature above based on a variety of characteristics; and • An original research agenda for future studies, based on gaps found in the current stateof-the-art body of knowledge. This article is organized as follows. After our introduction (Sect. 1), we present the research methods we used (Sect. 2) to frame the classification and coding system we used to scrutinize the relevant literature (Sect. 3). We then briefly detail our conceptual background in Sect. 4, while Sect. 5 sheds light on our results and subsequent discussion. We conclude in Sect. 6 by presenting an original, new research agenda forward in this field.