DIGITAL MATURITY AND TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION IN THE CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY: A GLOBAL BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF TRENDS, THEMATIC CLUSTERS, AND EMERGING FRONTIERS (2015–2025)
Description
Purpose: This study provides a detailed global bibliometric analysis of 446 articles found on the Scopus database, published in 2015-2025, to describe the dynamics of publications, the most impactful contributors, visualise thematic cluster patterns, and find novel areas of research by identifying bursts of keywords Design/Methodology/Approach: The PRISMA 2020 protocol guided systematic screening of the Scopus database. The Boolean search query of the form of “digital maturity” OR “digital technology” AND “construction industry” provided 778 initial records, narrowed down to 446 with subject area, document type, and language sequential filters. VOSviewer was used to map co-occurrence networks of keywords through bibliometric analysis, and the automaton-based burst detection algorithm with silhouette scoring of temporal keywords was adopted Findings: The dataset accumulates a total of 7,462 citations in 446 documents, a field h-index of 44 and a mean of 16.73 citations per document. The number of publications has increased fivefold; in 2015-2018, the access to 28 documents, and in 2024-2025, the access to 195 documents, respectively. China has the largest number of documents (93 documents), whereas the United Kingdom has the highest citation impact (2,096 citations). The most prolific African contributor (49 documents) is South Africa. The most common contributors are Australia with the high density of citations (47 documents, 1,806 citations; 38.4 per document). The most focused active frontiers of the field, according to keyword burst detection, are productivity (burst strength = 5.817, 2019-2023 silhouette = 1.000) and Nigeria as a research geography (4.056, 2023-2024 silhouette = 0.896). Sustainable construction (3.564, 2019–2024, silhouette = 0.763) and infrastructure (3.060, 2019–2024, silhouette = 1.000). Also, four thematic clusters were defined. Research Limitations: The analysis is limited to Scopus-indexed, English-language publications. Disposal of papers during manual content screening introduces a degree of subjectivity. Practical Implications: Policymakers in developing economies should prioritise digital infrastructure investment. Research funders should direct resources toward the identified active frontiers. Originality/Value: This is a bibliometric analysis that comprehensively map the intellectual space of digital maturity and technology uptake in construction through burst detection and silhouette scoring alongside the traditional bibliometric techniques over the entire 2015-2025 horizon, providing a data-based prioritisation of future research directions. Keywords: Digital maturity; digital technology adoption; construction industry; bibliometric analysis; VOSviewer; PRISMA; Construction 4.0; sustainable construction
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The choice of Scopus as the primary source of data was explained by its better coverage of engineering, construction management, and environmental science journals compared to Web of Science as well as its effective application as the source of reference in bibliometric research on construction management (Baas et al., 2020; Aghimien et al., 2020). The Boolean search query that was used in the title, abstract, and key fields was as follows: TITLE-ABS-KEY ("digital maturity" OR "digital technology") AND ("construction industry") AND PUBYEAR > 2014 The preliminary search resulted in 778 documents. Sequential inclusion filters were used: the corpus was narrowed to 648 environmental science and engineering subject areas, 454 articles and conference papers, and 446 English-language documents were used to analyze the corpus
Institutions
- Durban University of TechnologyKwaZulu-Natal, Durban