Carbon Costing and Digital Tools in the Construction Industry: A Global Bibliometric Analysis of Trends, Thematic Clusters, and Emerging Frontiers
Description
This study provides a global research mapping of carbon cost and digital tools in construction, exploring publication growth, thematic patterns and research frontiers. 239 Scopus-indexed documents (2005-2026) out of a pool of 318 were analysed for this PRISMA-based bibliometric study. Selection criteria involved relevance to the subject, type of document and language. Keyword co-occurrence and clustering were analysed with VOSviewer, with Kleinberg’s burst detection and silhouette scoring to establish temporal trends. Citation, publication, geographical and source distributions were also mapped. The data set has 2,232 citations, h-index of 22 and average citations of 9.34, suggesting a burgeoning field. The trend is highly exponential, with 55.2% of papers published in 2024-2026. China is the most productive, with the United Kingdom and the Netherlands having greater citation influence. Keyword burst analysis reveals circular economy as the most prominent frontier (burst strength = 11.901; silhouette = 0.953) suggesting digital tools and circular construction are a strong fit. Other high-intensity topics include carbon emission, carbon cycle, waste management, and sustainable building, with all having near-perfect silhouette scores, suggesting tightly focused and rapidly evolving research clusters around lifecycle carbon integration. This is a bibliometric analysis of carbon costing and digital tools in the construction industry, revealing key research trends and opportunities for future digital carbon management.
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The Scopus database was selected as the primary data source because of its comprehensive coverage of engineering, environmental science, and construction management journals, its structured metadata that supports reliable bibliometric analysis, and its established status as the preferred database for construction management bibliometric studies (Baas et al., 2020; Aghimien et al., 2020). The following Boolean search string was used to include title, abstract, and keyword fields: TITLE-ABS-KEY ( "Carbon Cost" OR "Digital Tools" AND "Construction Industry" ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( SUBJAREA , "ENGI" ) OR LIMIT-TO ( SUBJAREA , "ENVI" ) OR LIMIT-TO ( SUBJAREA , "EART" ) OR LIMIT-TO ( SUBJAREA , "MATE" ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( DOCTYPE , "ar" ) OR LIMIT-TO ( DOCTYPE , "cp" ) OR LIMIT-TO ( DOCTYPE , "re" ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( LANGUAGE , "English" ) ) The initial retrieval returned 318 documents. Sequential inclusion criteria were applied and it was restricted to engineering, environmental science, earth and planetary science, and materials science subject areas (280 documents); restriction to articles, conference papers, and reviews (249 documents); and restriction to English-language publications (239 documents retained for analysis). Six complementary analytical methods were applied to the 239-document corpus. First, publication trend analysis defined the field's evolution in four stages based on the annual growth rate. Second, country analysis characterised the geographic distribution of publications and citations by author's country of affiliation (Scopus' affiliations field). Third, author productivity analysis evaluated the field's leading authors in terms of the number of documents and citation counts. Fourth, source productivity analysis mapped the journals and conference proceedings that constitute the sources of information in the field, including calculations of citation density. Fifth, we conducted network analysis of the co-occurrence of keywords using VOSviewer with a minimum occurrence of 10, which produced a four-cluster network. This threshold was adjusted to the dataset size in line with the work of Aghimien et al. (2020) and Klarin (2024). Sixth, keyword burst detection used Kleinberg's (2002) two-state automaton algorithm for all keywords with at least three occurrences, calculating both burst and silhouette scores for each keyword to detect time periods of intense research interest and identify both highly specific, temporally confined emergent hotspots and more diffuse, field-wide anchor terms.
Institutions
- Durban University of TechnologyKwaZulu-Natal, Durban