1. Introduction
Buildings is an international journal in the fields of building science, building engineering and architecture. Prof. Chimay J. Anumba, the founding editor, created the journal in 2011 [
1]. Between 2011 and 2018,
Buildings was published as a quarterly journal. In 2017, Prof. David Arditi became the editor-in-chief and in the next year, the journal increased the number of issues and began to publish every month. Today, the journal is well recognized in the scientific community. It is indexed in Scopus (Elsevier) and the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) of Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics). According to the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) of the Web of Science, the journal’s 2020 impact factor was 2.648, ranking 32nd of 66 journals in the category of Construction & Building Technology and 61st of 136 in Engineering, Civil. This was the first time that
Buildings received an impact factor.
Recently,
Buildings is celebrating its 10th anniversary. Inspired by this event, the main aim of this paper is to provide a thorough bibliometric analysis of the journal from the last ten years. A bibliometric performance analysis of
Buildings is carried out based on key factors, such as the publication and citation structures, the most cited papers, and the leading authors, institutions and countries/regions. To map the bibliographic data graphically, this work uses a wide range of indicators including bibliographic coupling [
2], co-citation [
3], co-occurrence of keywords and collaboration. To this end, this work uses the Scopus database and Bibliometrix [
4] to collect and analyze the bibliographic material.
Note that in the literature, it has become the norm to develop bibliometric research since it provides scholars with realistic and objective statistics and analysis, enabling researchers to build a comprehensive knowledge and understanding of the research field. The different application fields of bibliometric analysis include civil engineering and management [
5], automation in construction [
6], energy [
7], road and bridge engineering [
8], transport [
9], etc. Particularly, it is interesting to publish special issues or papers to celebrate the significant anniversary of a journal. A key example is that in 2015,
Knowledge-Based Systems published a bibliometric analysis of its scientific content to celebrate its 25th birthday [
10]. Many other journals have published special issues or papers to celebrate their anniversaries, such as
International Journal of Systems Science [
11] and
Information Sciences [
12].
This paper is organized as follows:
Section 2 presents the bibliometric methods used in this paper.
Section 3 provides the bibliometric performance analysis. The science mapping analysis of
Buildings is carried out in
Section 4. Finally,
Section 5 gives a short description of the main findings and conclusions of the paper.
2. Bibliometric Methods
The term bibliometrics was first created by Paul Otlet [
13] in 1934 and further defined by Broadus [
14] as “the quantitative study of physical published units, or of bibliographic units, or of the surrogates for either”. Bibliometrics is valued as an important and useful approach to analyze academic research outputs and deal with overwhelming volumes of information [
15]. Several decades ago, it was difficult for researchers to collect and classify complex bibliometric data due to the lack of efficient technology or software. However, thanks to the rapid development of science and technology, different bibliometric tools and software are available now to assist scholars in conducting their research [
16].
In this paper, the bibliometric data come from Scopus, one of the world’s leading academic databases. Scopus covers more than 80 million documents and 17 million author profiles. The search covered the period from April 2011 to October 2021 using “Buildings” as the source title. Note that there was another journal with the same name between 1996 and 2002 and it is not included within the scope of this research. A total of 1466 articles shown as the results were considered (1542 articles have been published in Buildings so far, but the other 76 documents were omitted since they were not directly available in Scopus).
The authors used Bibliometrix to collect and analyze the dataset and develop the graphical visualization. This unique tool was developed in R language by Aria and Cuccurullo [
4] in 2017. To conduct this study using a bibliometric method, several bibliometric indicators from different perspectives were considered. As for bibliometric performance analysis, we analyzed the journal’s annual publications, citation structure and the most cited papers, as well as the leading authors, institutions and countries/regions. As for science mapping analysis in
Section 4, we analyzed the keywords of the articles published in
Buildings and describe studies based on citations, co-citations and collaborations. The whole process of bibliometric analysis of the journal is illustrated in
Figure 1.
5. Discussions and Conclusions
Buildings was first published 10 years ago in 2011. Motivated by its 10th anniversary, this study presents a bibliometric analysis of publications in the journal between 2011 and 2021. This work adopts two bibliometric methods: performance analysis and science mapping [
38].
Regarding performance analysis, the research first identified the publication and citation structure of the journal. The results show the strong growth of Buildings throughout time. Up to now, the journal has published more than one thousand documents and is widely acknowledged by scholars all over the world. The most cited paper, entitled “Design of A Sustainable Building: A Conceptual Framework for Implementing Sustainability in the Building Sector”, was written by Akadiri, P.O., Chinyio, E.A. and Olomolaiye, P.O. in 2012. Then, this work reviewed the leading authors, institutions and countries/regions. The results indicate that Italy is the most productive country in Buildings, well above the results of the USA, which appears at the second position. The University of New South Wales, located in Australia, has been the most productive affiliation over the past 10 years with 46 publications and 345 citations in total. Looking at the most cited authors, we recognize the contributions of Sepasgozar, S.M.E. from Australia, Al-Kodmany, K. from the USA, Bedon, C. from Italy and Zhang, X. from Sweden. In this sense, it is clear that the journal is becoming very popular worldwide.
In order to delve deeper into the results, this work used science mapping in
Section 4. This approach provides a more comprehensive visualization of the results. We considered author keywords, three-fields plot of institutions, keywords and main journal sources, citations, co-citations and collaboration. From the analysis of author keywords, we can conclude that the journal published more on the topics of “sustainability”, “energy efficiency” and “thermal comfort”. Between 2011 and 2014, scholars in
Buildings published papers mainly about simulation, climate change and energy. However, in the following four years, “energy efficiency” became the most popular topic, followed by “life cycle assessment” and “buildings”. In the last three years, “masonry”, “energy efficiency” and “reinforced concrete” have attracted more attention from researchers. This result provides us with the developing trends of topics of the journal.
This journal is closely connected to other leading journals in the field, such as Energy and Buildings and Building and Environment. As for the collaboration network in Buildings, this study provides a knowledge domain map that identifies collaborative networks of researchers between journals and countries/regions. The results show that institutions from the same country or region work more closely together. Italy has the widest range of cooperative partners, followed by the United Kingdom, Australia, the USA and China. These five countries are high-yield countries.
This study is useful to scholars, publishers or others interested in building science, building engineering and architecture. It provides people with a comprehensive overview of Buildings from the past ten years using a bibliometric method and also forms a base for initiating further study in this area. For example, it is worth noting that hot topics such as energy efficiency, cultural heritage and climate change may continue to attract attention. Furthermore, through the previous analysis, we can predict that the journal will be acknowledged by more and more people over the world in the future. The number of publications and citations will likely continue to increase, and the research topics in the journal may become increasingly various and in-depth. There is no doubt that Buildings will continue to provide a platform for the expression and dissemination of ideas and strengthen cooperation among authors, institutions and countries/regions, as well as build a bridge between academia and industry.
Furthermore, there are some gaps the journal should pay attention to. For example, with the increase in publications, the diversity of research directions and fields has increased, too. The journal should maintain a quality/quantity balance and also emphasize on the depth and contribution of articles. Furthermore, Buildings runs special issues to create collections of papers on specific topics, but the classification of special issues can be further refined and become more innovative. It is also advisable for the journal to take some measures, such as organizing academic events, to encourage scholars and promote the development of academia.
This study provides a full description of Buildings but also presents some limitations. Since the data were collected from the Scopus database, the limitations of this database may also apply to this study. For instance, 76 documents are omitted since they are not directly available in Scopus, so some results may not be completely correct. Another limitation is that although the work uses a wide range of indicators in order to provide a comprehensive overview from different perspectives, we have to acknowledge that the work is not perfect and there are some missing perspectives we did not take into consideration. Future research should make improvements in these two directions to provide better research.