Patterns and trends in Building Information Modeling (BIM) research: A Latent Semantic Analysis

a r t i c l e i n f o Building Information Modeling (BIM) has emerged as one of the key streams in construction and civil engineering research within the last decade. Given this interest in BIM and the rapidly increasing volume of BIM literature, it is important to understand and discern the core themes and trends emerging in BIM research, and its implications for broader research. The previously reported studies to identify the core of BIM research are typically subjective and qualitative, and hence, prone to bias and interpretation of a limited number of reviewed papers. There is a lack of comprehensive, quantified and systematic classification of the BIM literature. This research brings some clarity by synthesizing and labeling a large corpus of BIM research studies published from 2004 through 2014. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a natural language processing technique was applied to the abstracts of 975 academic papers. This objective analysis reveals twelve principal research areas. Various specific research themes associated with each principal area have been identified. These principal research areas and research themes indicate the patterns and trends in BIM research. Building Information Modeling (BIM) has emerged as one of the key streams in construction and civil engineering and received a considerable amount of attention by researchers within the last decade, with a rapid increase in the number of related publications. The rapid increase in the volume of BIM literature poses a critical challenge in terms of identifying the research direction and trends, because despite the increasing volume of the literature, the core of BIM research and related themes remain unclear and poorly understood. Previous efforts to review the trends in academic BIM literature are typically qualitative, subjective and based on manual review. These reviews such as [1–6], provide an elaborate guidance, categorization and framework for implementation , adoption and technologies of BIM to the various participants of a project and to the researchers. Others such as [7–11] have discussed trends and future directions based on surveys, critical literature reviews, often with a specific frame of reference such as BIM for facilities management or so on. The manual review, while insightful, is prone to be biased and limiting in terms of the number of articles that can be reviewed. In such manual reviews there is a potential tendency to read the more cited and influential papers, which while being a valid approach for review, might …