A scientometric analysis and review of construction labour productivity research

Purpose - Labour productivity in construction has fallen behind other industries in most of the world and has declined continuously for decades. Although several scholarly research projects have been conducted to salvage the prevalent low labour productivity in construction, contractors in the construction industry have continued to grapple with the devastating impact of low productivity. The purpose of this study is to determine key areas of focus necessary to promote productivity growth in construction. Design/methodology/approach - Bibliometric and scientometric assessments were conducted to map the existing construction labour productivity (CLP) studies and establish key focus areas in the research domain. The keywords “Construction Productivity” OR “Construction Labour Productivity” OR “Construction Labor Productivity” OR “Construction Worker Productivity”. Findings - Emerging trends in the CLP research field are reported. The study also determined the most productive authors and collaboration among authors, most productive journals, most active regions and publications with the highest impact in CLP research. Research limitations/implications - Documents published in the Scopus database were considered for analysis because of the wider coverage of the database. Journal and conference articles written in English language represent the inclusion criteria, while articles in press, review, book chapters, editorial, erratum, note, short survey and data paper were excluded from analysis. The study is also limited to documents published from 2012 to 2021. Practical implications - The study brought to the awareness of the industry practitioners and other construction stakeholders, the key knowledge areas that are critical to promoting productivity growth in construction. Originality/value - Except bibliometric analysis, previous research studies have used different approaches to investigate productivity in construction. The study presented future research directions through the emerging knowledge areas identified in the study.