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Article

A Data-Driven Approach to Trace the Development of Lean Construction in Building Projects: Topic Shift and Main Paths

by
Hengqin Wu
1,2,
Xue Lin
3,*,
Xiao Li
2,
Boyu Zhang
4,
Clyde Zhengdao Li
1 and
Huabo Duan
5
1
College of Civil and Transportation Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China
2
Department of Building and Real Estate, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong 999077, China
3
School of Government, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China
4
Department of Science, Technology and Standards, China Academy of Building Research, Beijing 100029, China
5
Underground Polis Academy, College of Civil and Transportation Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Buildings 2022, 12(5), 616; https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings12050616
Submission received: 14 April 2022 / Revised: 29 April 2022 / Accepted: 1 May 2022 / Published: 7 May 2022
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Human-Machine Collaboration in Industrialized Construction: Theories, Approaches, Key Technologies, and Applications)
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Abstract

:
Due to the varied ideas of lean philosophy adopted in the construction industry, it is challenging to trace the development of lean philosophy in terms of how the field evolved by adopting the lean ideas and how the topic shifted. However, it is challenging to extract useful information from the massive body of literature and to trace the development of Lean Construction in Building Projects. Previous studies have conducted longitudinal analyses of scientific areas depending on the authors’ interpretation and explanation, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. To address this concern, this study proposes a data-driven approach integrating N-gram extraction, citation analysis, and a global key-route algorithm to trace the development. Based on the collected literature of Lean Construction in Building Projects, N-grams were extracted as topics from the raw texts of titles, abstracts, and keywords, and the shifts in topics were measured. Then, the references were extracted from the literature to create a citation network to represent the knowledge flows, and the global key-route algorithm was used to identify the most valuable flows reflecting the main paths of the development. The results illustrate how Lean Construction in Building Projects evolved and how the topics shifted, providing an exciting opportunity to reveal this development by using a data-driven approach rather than personal judgments. The findings can help us to understand that the field of Lean Construction in Building Projects was driven and motivated not only by the “lean theory”, but also by problems in the practice of building projects. Moreover, lean theory leads to flourishing research on informatization, and BIM will be an important tool to better achieve lean thinking in construction.

1. Introduction

In the last three decades, the application of lean philosophy in the construction industry has gained increased interest from both academia and industry. Lean philosophy emerged in the 1950s, helping Japanese auto companies to gain competitive edges for their performance. Lean production was systematically introduced in 1988, providing clear views on what activities cause waste in the process of production [1]. The potential adoption of lean philosophy in the construction industry has been viewed as a new paradigm that can help achieve considerable improvement in productivity and project performance [2,3]. After the 1990s, a number of research works have investigated Lean Construction in Building Projects from various perspectives, and terminologies from lean production were translated into the construction industry, such as “workflows” [4,5], “pull scheduling” [6], “last planner” [7,8], and “variability” [9]. In recent years, lean philosophy has been adopted for the development of simulation and planning approaches for modular integrated construction [10,11,12]. Lean Construction in Building Projects has received major scholarly attention; however, few studies have been conducted to explore the trend of the development. Since there are various ideas of lean philosophy applied in the construction industry, this poses a challenge to trace the development of the field of Lean Construction in Building Projects in terms of how the field evolved by adopting lean ideas and how the topics shifted. To address this concern, this study aims to trace the development of Lean Construction in Building Projects.
In the area of Construction Engineering and Management (CEM), data-driven approaches are rarely used to produce a rigid and objective view of sub-fields’ development. A large volume of studies have predicted emerging sub-fields, [3,13], identified significant papers, and explored the existing research interests [14]. These studies were mostly conducted through qualitative methods, which heavily depended on the authors’ interpretation, always ignoring the underlying associations among literature. Against this gap, this study develops a data-driven approach that integrates N-gram extraction, citation analysis, and global key-route algorithm, tracing the development of Lean Construction in Building Projects.
This study utilized N-gram extraction from the unstructured text data of titles, abstracts, and keywords of Lean Construction in Building Projects literature to map the topic shift. The titles, abstracts, and keywords highlight the methodologies and importance of the literature covering the main topics [15]. An N-gram considers the N words in a sequence as a feature; it was proposed in the 1940s [16] and has been employed in a large and growing body of literature [17,18].
This study utilized citation analysis and the global key-route algorithm from the citation data of Lean Construction in Building Projects literature to measure the main paths of the development. Citation data reveal the underlying associations by modeling the knowledge flows in a social network [19,20], enhancing the understanding of the development of academic fields [21,22]. In addition, citation data offer longitudinal information about unidirectional linkages that connect the research works from the past to the future [23], indicating the process whereby observations, ideas, methodologies, and insights are transferred through publications [20,24,25]. A global key-route algorithm was applied to identify the most valuable flows from a citation network reflecting the main paths of development, such as eTourism [26], Data Quality [27], Nanoscience [28], Corporate Social Responsibility [29], IT outsourcing [30], and shareholder activism [31]. By streamlining simple and clarified paths from a large-scale citation network [32], the main paths reflect valuable knowledge flows between studies, representing the major development routes within an academic field [33]. Although the activities of citing and being cited between publications might not fully represent the academic fields [34,35], they are regarded as a constructive approach due to the fact that alternative measurements have not been observed [34].
This study provides an opportunity to offer profound insights into the integration of a data-driven approach to trace the development of Lean Construction in Building Projects. The data-driven approach extracts valuable information from a relatively large number of data and employs useful methods to achieve traceable and visualized results. Previous CEM studies summarized the development of a sub-field mainly depending on the authors’ interpretation and explanation [36,37,38,39]. Even though some studies provided comprehensive and systematic results, there is unintentional bias from the authors’ personal choices of research works and authors [40]. The findings in this study help us to understand that the field of Lean Construction in Building Projects was driven and motivated not only by “lean theory”, but also by the problems in the practice of building projects. Moreover, lean theory leads to flourishing research on informatization, and BIM will be an important tool to better achieve lean thinking in construction.

2. Methodology

This study employed the aforementioned N-gram extraction, citation analysis, and global key-route algorithms to trace the development of Lean Construction in Building Projects by measuring topic shifts and main paths. Figure 1 shows the roadmap of this study, which describes the data collection and analysis procedures. First, the literature for Lean Construction in Building Projects were collected. Second, N-grams were extracted as topics from all the texts of the titles, abstracts and keywords of the literature of the database. Based on the time span analysis, the topic shift of Lean Construction in Building Projects was measured. Third, the references were extracted and the citation network of Lean Construction in Building Projects was established. The global key-route algorithm was used to streamline the main paths of the development of Lean Construction in Building Projects from the citation network.

2.1. Data Collection and Processing

Data collection is crucial for data-driven approaches, leading to significant impacts on the results. To collect a comprehensive database, the authors made the following arrangements. Firstly, the publications relevant to Lean Construction in Building Projects and the references cited in those publications were collected as the database. Secondly, the authors selected 15 outstanding journals in the domain of CEM as publication sources for further retrieval. These journals were selected based on two rules. On one hand, a journal needs to be widely recognized by the research community of CEM [14,41,42,43,44]. A number of CEM scholars have identified prestigious journals. For example, Wing [42] developed a measurement of the quality rating to identify top CEM journals, including JCEM-ASCE, JCEM, ECAM, JME, AIC, IJPM, and BRI (Table 1 provides the initials for journals); Levitt [45] proposed that CEM journals related to computing science, such as CCE, become important; Li et al. [14] claimed that PMJ, IJPM, and JME are CEM journals with high repetition rates; Lu et al. [43] provided a review study based on the CEM journals of JME, CCIE, JCEM-ASCE, AIC, ECAM, CCE, and IJPM; Li et al. [14] stated that PMJ, IJPM, and JME are renowned journals of CEM; Lu et al. [43] selected JCEM-ASCE, ECAM, JME, IJPM, AIC, CCE, and CCIE to conduct their work; Olawumi et al. [44] found that most BIM studies have been published in the journals AIC, CCE, CCIE, AEI, JCEM, and JME. Table 1 shows the 15 journals that were selected for retrieving papers. The searching criteria were “Topic” = “lean” and “publication name” = “15 CEM journals’ names”. The retrieval date was 17 June 2017. Overall, 143 studies were collected as the database.
Based on the database of Lean Construction in Building Projects literature, two types of data were extracted to measure the topic shift and the main paths. The raw texts of the titles, abstracts, and keywords of Lean Construction in Building Projects literature were extracted for further N-gram extraction. In addition, references with a higher location citation count (LCC, the number of times cited by the literature in the database) were extracted, forming the publication pool combined with the Lean Construction in the Building Projects literature. Based on the relationships between citing and being cited among the publications in the pool, citation analysis was used to establish the citation network of Lean Construction in Building Projects. With respect to the criteria for reference extraction, this study uses H-index as the threshold level of LCC [46,47]. Rather than manually setting a minimum number or percentage such as 10, 50, 1%, or 5%, the H-index was used to offer an unbiased criterion to filter significant publications [46,48]. In this case, the H-index was calculated as 7, and references that had no less than 7 LCC were added into the publication pool. In total, 174 studies (143 Lean Construction in Building Projects literature and 31 publications extracted from the references) constituted the publication pool for establishing the citation network.

2.2. N-Gram Technique

The raw texts of the titles, abstracts and keywords conveyed nothing before useful information is extracted. A number of studies utilized N-gram extraction to identify useful information from raw texts. N-gram considers the N words in a sequence as a feature; it was proposed in the 1940s [16] and has been employed in a large and growing body of literature [17,18]. In this case, three typical N-gram models, N = 1 (unigram), 2 (bigram), and 3 (trigram), were used to extract the topics. The values of the topics are the occurrences of the N-grams in the raw texts, typically weighted in the same manner.

2.3. Citation Analysis

An increasing number of studies have adopted citation analysis as a way to explore the evolution of scientific domains [26,27,29,30,49]. Citation linkages between publications are a good indicator of knowledge flows, which explicitly represent the information of communication processes associated with the academic interactions [21]. In addition, citations are a typical social activity providing messages of how ideas, observations, and methods are transferred [20,23,50]. Therefore, the publications of Lean Construction in Building Projects can be processed as a citation network, in which the citations represent their relationships, and thus knowledge flows can be measured by the links from the cited studies to citing ones [50].
Normally, a citation network is directed and acyclic, because a publication can only cite prior ones [23,51]. In addition, all nodes within the citation network can be divided into three categories based on their functions: sources, ends, and intermediate nodes. Sources are publications that have never cited other publications, whereas ends are publications that have never been cited by others. Intermediate nodes are publications that both cite and are cited. In a citation network, knowledge flows are derived from the sources to the ends.

2.4. Global Key-Route Algorithm

The so-called main paths are the key routes streamlined from the citation network using social network analysis (SNA) techniques [32]. Because one paper cannot cite any later ones, the links and directions in a citation network denote the knowledge transfer over time, and the network is time-dependent [52]. Therefore, by examining representative publications at different moments of time, the main paths were streamlined from the network, turning the spotlight on significant academic achievements in a dynamic sequence [20]. The concept of main paths was introduced in 1989 [32] and was further developed by Hummon and Doreian [32] and Verspagen [50].
While all the linkages in a citation network represent the knowledge flows, the main paths reflect most important ones, which are together built up as a citation-linked chain [53] interpreting the major development routes of a given field.
The main path measurement highly depends on the traversal counts of the linkages. To date, various methods have been developed and introduced to measure the traversal counts, including search path link count, search path node pair (SPNP), node pair projection count (NPPC), and search path count (SPC). Recently, scholars have preferred using SPC to compute the traversal counts. SPC captures the traversal count for a linkage by counting the times the linkage has been passed by all the search paths. The search paths are the possible routes from all source nodes to end nodes in the citation network. There may be many search paths that start from source nodes and close at end ones. For example, in Figure 2, there are a total of 10 possible routes from source nodes (S1, S2, and S3 in Figure 2) to end nodes (E1, E2, and E3 in Figure 2). In particular, the link S1A has the highest SPC value, being passed by five possible routes. More SPCs of a link denote that this link plays a more important role in the development [54].
To date, four algorithms have been developed and introduced to measure the main paths based on the SPC value: local algorithm, global algorithm, global key-route algorithm, and multiple algorithm. The local algorithm follows a rule of “priority-first search” [32], exploring the main paths by selecting the linkage with most SPC value from a source node. The local algorithm may not have the largest overall SPC value, whereas the global algorithm can offer a method to trace the path with the largest overall SPC value [55]. The local algorithm identifies the main paths with a progressive focus, whereas the global algorithm identified the main paths with the overall significance, and some diffusion links with high SPC value may be neglected. Therefore, the global key-route algorithm was introduced to overcome this drawback. This algorithm identifies the linkages with the largest SPC value and then searches the routes combining forward and backward from the linkages. The global key-route algorithm traces the major knowledge diffusion routes while considering both the developing path and the long-term influence. This study uses the global key-route algorithm to measure the main paths for Lean Construction in Building Projects development.
Based on the citation network, SPC value, and global key-route algorithm, we actually obtain a measurable method to recognize substantial publications and their diffusion routes, because under this method, being cited by others is more important than citing. A citation network may incorporate numerous knowledge diffusion routes, but only a small number of them, which always have a higher LCG value, occupy key positions in the network and thus have a higher probability of appearing in the main paths [20].

3. Results

3.1. Topic Shifts in Lean Construction in Building Projects

As Figure 3 shows, we divided the whole time range into four periods to show the topic shift of Lean Construction in Building Projects. The most frequent 15 topics in each time period were displayed, ranked by their occurrence times, from top to bottom. The topics are dashed with scaled colors according to the rankings in the period of 2014–2017. The topic shift can be clearly revealed by the changes of top topics in different time periods. Many topics (in yellow and red color) in the earlier time periods dropped from the top list in the following time periods (the topics with black links drop from the bottom).
In the first 10 years (1996–2005), lean-production-related topics gained much attention, such as variability, buffers, manufacturing, production theory, and labor performance. Other important topics mainly pertain to specific concerns of construction productivity, such as shoring, performance measurement, construction performance, re-engineering construction, falsework, and critical load. However, they did not sustain the top positions in the following periods.
Lean, lean construction, simulation, and performance maintained the top 15 in the whole time span. During 2006–2009, the research concentrated on management rules for Lean Construction in Building Projects, as principles and lean principles emerged as top topics in 2006–2009. Some other topics, including construction process, delivery, waste, on-site, and scheduling, gained more attention but did not remain popular in the next period.
In the 2010–2013 period, BIM emerged as a popular topic that was frequently used. Scholars tend to link BIM and Lean Construction in Building Projects to do their research, and this trend seems accelerated in the following three years (2014–2017). Some new topics (in green) emerged as top topics in recent research on Lean Construction in Building Projects, including planning, safety, prefabrication, workflow, subcontractors, and last planner.

3.2. Main Paths of Lean Construction in Building Projects

In order to take a deeper look at the development of Lean Construction in Building Projects, key publications that played important roles in the main paths were further analyzed. Overall, 18 publications were identified as central notes, which form the main paths of the development of Lean Construction in Building Projects. These publications may not cover all influential papers in Lean Construction in Building Projects, but they were identified as playing important roles in serving as a link between past and future. Appendix A (Table A1) shows detailed information about those 18 publications. Figure 4 shows the main paths that indicated the most important knowledge or idea flows, denoting the major development routes of Lean Construction in Building Projects. In particular, each node represents a publication, and the arrows between them show the knowledge flows based on the relationships between citing and being cited. The links’ thickness denotes the SPC value, referring to the importance of citation channels that have been passed by Lean Construction in Building Projects publications. In a word, the global key-route algorithm can make significant publications appear on main paths, always with more citations and high SPC values between them. Moreover, four development phases have been identified in the main paths, attached with different colors, namely “introduction of the lean production philosophy to construction”, “lean construction principles”, “lean construction model”, and “research linking BIM and lean construction”.

3.2.1. Phase One: Introduction of the Lean Production Philosophy to Construction

The first phase of Lean Construction in Building Projects is from 1988 to 1997, comprising four publications represented by red nodes in the main paths. At this beginning phase, scholars initiated a foundational discussion on the possible adoption of lean production philosophy on the construction industry, which dates back to 1988. According to Ohno’s landmark book of Toyota production system, after the large-scale production systemic, the lean production philosophy was introduced, which emerged in the 1950s. The core of this philosophy is “just-in-time”, with the purpose of cutting down the flow times of production systems, minimizing the waste and adapting to changes. In addition, the lean production philosophy advocates adding value by reducing and even eliminating waste from the value stream. Ohno’s work identified seven categories of waste in the production system of Toyota, and Womack expanded the categories by adding “design of goods and services that fail to meet customers’ needs” as a source of waste [56]. Since the construction industry has produced a large amount of waste, the lean production philosophy received much more attention in the construction industry after 1990. As a starting point of Lean Construction in Building Projects, Koskela articulated the possible applications of the lean production philosophy to construction in a seminal report in 1992. His report summarizes the general principles of applying lean production philosophy to construction, and proposed the fundamental assumption that construction should be viewed as a flow process [57]. Five years later, supported by the members of The International Group on Lean Construction in Building Projects (IGLC), Alarcón summarized emerging work linking lean and construction and introduced the concept of “Lean Construction in Building Projects” [58]. These four publications are the milestones in the main paths of Lean Construction in Building Projects, indicating the start of Lean Construction in Building Projects as a research domain, and offering fundamental theories in support of the following substantial development of Lean Construction in Building Projects.

3.2.2. Phase Two: Test the Application of Lean Principles in Construction

Due to the difference between the environment in construction and manufacturing, it is inappropriate to directly apply lean principles to construction [59]. Given the potentials of the application of lean theory to construction, papers in this phase mainly discuss whether the principles underlying lean theory can be tested in construction and which aspects of lean initiatives should be introduced in construction. Therefore, to follow up on the “Introduction of the lean production philosophy to construction”, papers in the second phase mainly focus on the application of lean principles to construction. The second phase is from 1998 to 2003, starting by Tommelein [6]. Inspired by the fundamental publications from the former phase and lessons drawn from the “pull” idea of lean production, Tommelein proposed a management strategy, namely “Pull-Driven Scheduling” to replace the traditional process management, which was successfully implemented to improve performance for the installation of pipe-spool. Managing variability is another important idea of lean production. The major assumption of this lean theory is that reducing the variability can prompt the labor and cost performance. Thomas et al. [60] test this assumption in construction, and the results indicate that variability in labor productivity has a much higher impact on the project performance than workflow variability. The idea of improving the reliability of flows leads to better performance, another lean principle, was validated in construction by Thomas et al. [61], who proposed that effective flow management can achieve better labor performance.

3.2.3. Phase Three: Lean Management Model

Only two publications were identified as important publications that play central roles in the development of lean construction from 2004 to 2008. In 2007, Sacks proposed a lean management model that comprised certain principles of Lean Construction in Building Projects, rethinking the needs and desires of the clients [62]. Live simulation and computer simulation were designed to assess the lean management model by implementing a live management game and computer program [63]. The results of those two stimulations showed that applying lean management model can increase throughput, improve cash flow, and reduce apartment delivery. This model was claimed as a powerful tool to minimize waste without resource consumption.

3.2.4. Phase Four: Research Linking BIM and Lean Construction in Building Projects

The fourth phase addressed the adoption of BIM to enable the implementation of effective lean practice. BIM was defined as a “building information model”, which was actually a process to prove the analysis and testing of building design with a set of compatible software [64]. When lean technologies were applied to construction, it was difficult for the construction industry to achieve all the functions that had been successfully implemented in manufacturing, because workflows are difficult to control and visualize, particularly when they are on-site. This raised academic works focusing on the potential benefits of employing BIM in Lean Construction in Building Projects. In 2009, Sacks suggested that BIM was more advanced than traditional visualization tools (i.e., 3D and 4D) for Lean Construction in Building Projects because BIM-based software can maintain more process transparency by delivering structured and easily accessed information to different participants [59]. His work also evaluated the potential benefits of implementing BIM with Lean Construction in Building Projects and advocated future research. In 2010, Sacks provided the BIM-based concept “KanBIM” for Lean Construction in Building Projects management by visualizing the workflow and facilitating profound collaboration among participants on- and off-site [65]. From this paper, the main paths of Lean Construction in Building Projects evolved into two branches, emphasizing the “flows” and “BIM”, respectively.
The branch of “BIM” was initiated by another academic paper by Sacks in 2010 that deeply analyzed the mechanism of the potential relation between BIM and Lean Construction in Building Projects [66]. This publication is a vital research work passed by four routes in the main paths, inspiring later research on the combination of BIM and Lean Construction in Building Projects. By building up a correlation matrix between the BIM functions and Lean Construction in Building Projects principles, the authors uncovered positive and negative perspectives for linking BIM and Lean Construction in Building Projects. Sacks’s work not only inspired further studies on the implementation of this advanced software system in Lean Construction in Building Projects, such as lean practices and BIM adoption [67] and visual management [68], but also inspired research on issues of stakeholders’ collaboration [69]. From Figure 4, we can see another branch derived from Sacks (2010a), mainly focusing on pull flow control [70], production flow in construction [71], and construction flow index [72].

4. Discussion

This paper looks into the black box of the development of Lean Construction in Building Projects using a data-driven approach, with the outcomes of the dynamic, objective, and visualized knowledge. By mapping and measuring the shift in topics and the main paths of Lean Construction in Building Projects over the last 22 years, the results provide significant implications for a better understanding of the current trend and future directions in both research and practices.
(1) Lean Construction in Building Projects is not only driven by the novel “lean philosophy” but also the problems in construction practice. Flyvbjerg et al. [73] defined three key factors that drive the academic field in social science: problem-driven, theory-driven, and data-driven factors. From the main paths, we can observe that the lean theory stimulates the initiation of Lean Construction in Building Projects. However, as time goes by, because environments and processes of manufacturing and construction projects have many differences, researchers test which part of lean theory can fit the construction environment and develop principles and models for Lean Construction in Building Projects. Future research in Lean Construction in Building Projects should go beyond the application of conventional Lean thinking such as value, workflow, and waste minimization. More emphasis should be put on the theoretical gap in order to integrate Lean Construction in Building Projects with some project management theories, for example, value management, sustainability, and stakeholder management.
(2) The observed trend of integrating BIM with Lean Construction in Building Projects leads to a flourishing research agenda on informatization. Recognized as an advanced tool to better achieve lean thinking in construction, BIM has significantly altered the main paths of Lean Construction in Building Projects, in which Sacks’s two papers identified the academic works that linked BIM and Lean Construction in Building Projects. With thorough reviews of the two works, we found that what is particularly needed in order to integrate BIM in Lean Construction in Building Projects is to visualize the flows of construction. After these two papers, all the publications on the main paths of Lean Construction in Building Projects concentrated on the themes of “BIM” and “flow”. In addition, the evolution of themes of Lean Construction in Building Projects (Figure 3) shows a growing preference for “BIM” in Lean Construction in Building Projects from 2010 to 2017. Essentially, BIM can provide an advanced management mode with visualized control process and better collaboration between different participants, which can help the adoption of lean philosophy in construction.

5. Conclusions

This study proposes a data-driven approach integrating N-gram extraction, citation analysis, and global key-route algorithm to trace the development of Lean Construction in Building Projects. Based on the collected literature of Lean Construction in Building Projects, N-grams were extracted as topics from the raw texts of titles, abstracts, and keywords, and the topic shifts were measured. Then, the references were extracted from the literature to create a citation network to represent the knowledge flows, and the global key-route algorithm was applied to measure the main paths of the development.
The major finding is the four phases in the development of Lean Construction in Building Projects: “Introduction of the lean production philosophy to construction”, “Test the application of lean principles in construction”, “lean management model”, and “research linking BIM and Lean Construction in Building Projects”. The findings help us to understand that the field of Lean Construction in Building Projects was driven and motivated not only by “lean theory”, but also by the problems in the practice of building projects. Moreover, the main paths diverged from linking BIM and lean, indicating that BIM is an important tool to better achieve lean thinking in construction. The findings in this paper provide readable and objective outputs to illustrate the development process of Lean Construction in Building Projects, which helps scholars to achieve a better understanding of the evolution and future trend of Lean Construction in Building Projects.
The present study contributes to the knowledge of by providing a data-driven approach that sheds light on the development of Lean Construction in Building Projects. Traditionally, reviewing the development of sub-fields of CEM depends on the authors’ interpretation and explanation. Even though some researchers have conducted review studies with comprehensive and systematic results, there is unintentional bias due to the authors’ personal choices in selecting the significant publications and authors [40]. With the progress of Lean Construction in Building Projects, there is plenty of literature providing enriched data such as texts and citation data. Manual methods often consume a lot of time and manpower, especially when the number of data is relatively large [74]. The rapid advancement of scientometric and text-mining techniques has made the acquisition and processing of those data much easier and more accessible. The era of big data provides new opportunities to trace the development of a sub-field of CEM in a more objective, visualized, and deep manner by utilizing the latest data-driven methods. This study, rather than drawing a picture of the Lean Construction in Building Projects development from subjective viewpoints and qualitative methods, traces the development by means of a data-driven approach using a relatively large number of data, providing not broad but unbiased and objective findings.
Similar to other scientometric studies, this study also has its limitations. Because one of the methodologies is conducted by citation records, the citing motivation of scholars may affect the accuracy. This may be offset by the key-route algorithm used in this study, because all the SPC values of links were considered. In addition, we only collected the relevant publications from the WoS, and some important research achievements may be overlooked. We made efforts to overcome this limitation by recognizing important references and putting them into the citation network to avoid leaving out the most important publications of Lean Construction in Building Projects. For example, papers from Lean Construction in Building Projects Journal and conference proceedings of the International Group for Lean Construction in Building Projects (IGLC) were also included in the publication pool for analysis even though they were not in the WoS (please see the attached file, which lists the 173 publications in the publication pool). In future research using citation-based analysis to trace development routes of a scientific field, it might be possible to employ techniques of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to identify citing activities and motivation. This could help achieve more accurate and interpretable results.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, H.W. and X.L. (Xue Lin); methodology, C.Z.L.; formal analysis, X.L. (Xiao Li) and B.Z.; data curation, H.D.; writing—original draft preparation, H.W. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Funding

This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (Grant No. 52078302), the National Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (Grant No. 2021A1515012204 and 2021A1515110474), the Shenzhen Science and Technology Innovation Commission (Grant No. JCYJ20190808174409266, No. GJHZ20200731095806017 and No. SGDX20201103093600002), Shenzhen Science and Technology Plan 695 (JCYJ20190808123013260), and Fellowship of China Post-doctoral Science Foundation (No. 2021M692169).

Data Availability Statement

The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to their containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Appendix A

Table
Table A1. Publications in the main path of Lean Construction in Building Projects.
Table A1. Publications in the main path of Lean Construction in Building Projects.
LabelTitle (Books Are Displayed in Italics)Journal/PublisherLCCWCCGCC
Mei
(2017)		Rent-Seeking Behavior of BIM-And IPD-Based Construction Project in ChinaEngineering Construction and Architectural Management000
Tezel
(2017)		Visual Management in Highways Construction and Maintenance in EnglandEngineering Construction and Architectural Management000
Sacks
(2017)		Construction Flow Index: A Metric of Production Flow Quality in ConstructionConstruction Management and Economics000
Sacks
(2016)		What Constitutes Good Production Flow in Construction?Construction Management and Economics112
Mahalingam
(2015)		Investigating the Role of Lean Practices in Enabling BIM Adoption: Evidence from Two Indian CasesJournal of Construction Engineering and Management029
Brodetskaia
(2013)		Stabilizing Production Flow of Interior and Finishing Works with Reentrant Flow in Building ConstructionJournal of Construction Engineering and Management4817
Sacks
(2010b)		Interaction of Lean and Building Information Modeling in ConstructionJournal of Construction Engineering and Management450268
Sacks
(2010a)		Requirements for Building Information Modeling Based Lean Production Management Systems for ConstructionAutomation in Construction1041157
Sacks
(2009)		Visualization of Work Flow to Support Lean Construction in Building ProjectsJournal of Construction Engineering and Management52187
Sacks
(2007b)		LEAPCON: Simulation of Lean Construction in Building Projects of High-Rise Apartment BuildingsJournal of Construction Engineering and Management51562
Sacks
(2007a)		Lean Management Model for Construction of High-Rise Apartment BuildingsJournal of Construction Engineering and Management92266
Thomas
(2003)		Improving Labor Flow Reliability for Better Productivity as Lean Construction in Building Projects PrincipleJournal of Construction Engineering and Management1440130
Thomas
(2002)		Reducing Variability to Improve Performance as A Lean Construction in Building Projects PrincipleJournal of Construction Engineering and Management1648162
Tommelein
(1998)		Pull-Driven Scheduling for Pipe-Spool Installation: Simulation of Lean Construction in Building Projects TechniqueJournal of Construction Engineering and Management1688315
Alarcon
(1997)		Lean Construction in Building ProjectsCRC Press631267
Womack
(1996)		Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your CorporationSimon & Schuster1860672
Koskela
(1992)		Application of The New Production Philosophy to ConstructionStanford University15511698
Ohno
(1988)		Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale ProductionProductivity Press2210385845
Notes: Label—first author and the publishing year; LCC—location citation count; WCC—citation count in WOS; GCC—citation count in Google Scholar.

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Buildings 12 00616 g001 550
Figure 1. The analysis procedures of this study.
Figure 1. The analysis procedures of this study.
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Figure 2. A citation network with the SPC value as weights.
Figure 2. A citation network with the SPC value as weights.
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Figure 3. The theme development of Lean Construction in Building Projects.
Figure 3. The theme development of Lean Construction in Building Projects.
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Figure 4. The main path of Lean Construction in Building Projects.
Figure 4. The main path of Lean Construction in Building Projects.
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Table
Table 1. Core journals of CEM.
Table 1. Core journals of CEM.
CategoryJournal2018 Impact FactorPublisher
1Theory, method, and applicationBuilding Research and Information (BRI)3.744Taylor & Francis (London, UK)
2Theory, method, and applicationIEEE Transactions on Engineering Management (ITEM)1.876IEEE Xplore (New York, US)
3Theory, method, and applicationJournal of Civil Engineering and Management (JCEM)2.029Taylor & Francis (London, UK)
4Theory, method, and applicationJournal of Infrastructure Systems (JIS)1.538ASCE (Reston, US)
5Theory, method, and applicationJournal of Management in Engineering (JME)3.269ASCE (Reston, US)
6Theory, method, and applicationJournal of Construction Engineering and Management (JCEM-ASCE)2.734ASCE (Reston, US)
7Theory, method, and applicationJournal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education and Practice (PIEEP)1.372ASCE (Reston, US)
8Theory, method, and applicationConstruction Management and Economics (CME)0Taylor & Francis (London, UK)
9Theory, method, and applicationEngineering Construction and Architectural Management (ECAM)1.561Emerald (Bingley, UK)
10Information and technologyComputer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering (CCIE)6.208John Wiley & Sons (New York, US)
11Information and technologyAutomation in Construction (AIC)4.313Elsevier (Amsterdam, Holland)
12Information and technologyAdvanced Engineering Informatics (AEI)3.772Elsevier (Amsterdam, Holland)
13Information and technologyJournal of Computing in Civil Engineering (CCE)2.554ASCE (Reston, US)
14Project managementInternational Journal of Project Management (IJPM)4.694Elsevier (Amsterdam, Holland)
15Project managementProject Management Journal (PMJ)2.043John Wiley & Sons (New York, US)
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Wu, H.; Lin, X.; Li, X.; Zhang, B.; Li, C.Z.; Duan, H. A Data-Driven Approach to Trace the Development of Lean Construction in Building Projects: Topic Shift and Main Paths. Buildings 2022, 12, 616. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings12050616

AMA Style

Wu H, Lin X, Li X, Zhang B, Li CZ, Duan H. A Data-Driven Approach to Trace the Development of Lean Construction in Building Projects: Topic Shift and Main Paths. Buildings. 2022; 12(5):616. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings12050616

Chicago/Turabian Style

Wu, Hengqin, Xue Lin, Xiao Li, Boyu Zhang, Clyde Zhengdao Li, and Huabo Duan. 2022. "A Data-Driven Approach to Trace the Development of Lean Construction in Building Projects: Topic Shift and Main Paths" Buildings 12, no. 5: 616. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings12050616

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