Digital Technologies and the Circular Economy in Construction: A Network-Analytic Scientometric Review of Intellectual Structure, Structural Integration and Thematic Acceleration
Description
Purpose – This study maps the intellectual structure of research on digital technologies for the circular economy (CE) in construction, moving beyond descriptive science mapping to a formal network-analytic diagnosis of how the field is structurally integrated and how its themes are accelerating. Design/methodology/approach – A corpus of 421 Scopus-indexed documents (2013–2026) was analysed through bibliometric performance analysis, keyword co-occurrence mapping in VOSviewer, and a reconstructed co-occurrence network subjected to multi-measure centrality analysis, cluster-cohesion estimation, modularity computation, and temporal emergence detection. Findings – The field is expanding at a compound annual rate of 73 per cent (corpus h-index 46). Betweenness-centrality analysis reveals a hub-and-spoke architecture in which circular economy is the singular structural bridge (betweenness 0.98) while all other nodes approach zero, despite high network density (0.81) and uniformly high degree centrality. Cluster-cohesion analysis shows that the material-recovery cluster is weakly integrated (cohesion 0.18) relative to the circular-digital and life-cycle clusters (0.46 and 0.48). Emergence analysis identifies sustainable building, environmental management, and life-cycle assessment as the most accelerated frontiers. Originality/value – This is a scientometric review of the field to combine multi-measure centrality, cluster-cohesion estimation, and temporal emergence detection, providing a structurally rigorous account that distinguishes the field's integrative core from its weakly bonded periphery and identifies outcome quantification as its decisive frontier.
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The study employed a scientometric review design integrating bibliometric performance analysis and network-analytic science mapping. Performance analysis quantified the productivity and impact of the field's documents, authors, sources, and countries. Science mapping reconstructed the keyword co-occurrence network and analysed its structure through formal network metrics. The integration of these two strands provided both a descriptive account of the field's output and an analytical account of its structure and evolution. Scopus was selected as the data source for its comprehensive coverage of engineering and environmental-science literature and its established suitability for bibliometric analysis. The search string TITLE-ABS-KEY ( "Construction" AND "Digital" AND "Circular economy" ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( SUBJAREA , "ENGI" ) OR LIMIT-TO ( SUBJAREA , "ENVI" ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( DOCTYPE , "ar" ) OR LIMIT-TO ( DOCTYPE , "cp" ) OR LIMIT-TO ( DOCTYPE , "re" ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( LANGUAGE , "English" ) ) AND PUBYEAR > 2012 AND PUBYEAR < 2025 was applied, restricted to the period 2013–2026 (595 documents), to the Engineering and Environmental Science subject areas, to journal articles, conference papers, and reviews (431 documents), and to English-language documents (421 documents). The initial search returned 595 records, which successive screening on subject area, document type, and language reduced to a final corpus of 421 documents comprising 210 articles, 117 conference papers, and 94 reviews. The earliest documents satisfying all criteria were published in 2019, defining the effective analytical window as 2019–2026, with 2026 partially indexed at the time of extraction. Co-occurrence and performance analyses applied minimum thresholds to ensure robustness: 100 citations per document (19 of 421 qualifying), five documents per author (9 of 1,408 qualifying), six documents per source (14 of 161 qualifying), 15 documents per country (13 of 75 qualifying), and 20 occurrences per keyword (38 of 2,982 qualifying). These thresholds follow established practice in bibliometric review and yield analytically tractable networks while retaining the field's substantive structure.
Institutions
- Durban University of TechnologyKwaZulu-Natal, Durban