Construction Management and Economics 40th anniversary: investigating knowledge structure and evolution of research trends

Celebrating Construction Management and Economics's (CME) 40th anniversary, the goal of this paper is to investigate the knowledge structure and evolution of research trends in CME since its inception. The associated objectives include: (1) analyzing CME’s scholarly characteristics; (2) studying CME’s publication output over time; (3) examining interconnectivities between CME’s research trends; and (4) exploring the potential citation impact of recently published CME’s papers. In doing so, this paper implemented a multistep methodology that consists of descriptive assessment, social network analysis (SNA), and predictive machine learning (ML). Results of descriptive assessment showed that CME has witnessed over the years a noticeable growth in the number of publications, citation trends, and collaborative research as depicted increased co-authorship, and that highest percentage of publications were related to “Strategy, Decision Making, Risk, and Finance”, “Project planning and Design” and “Contemporary Issues”. Output of SNA highlights that research areas with the highest interconnectivity included “Strategy, Decision Making, Risk and Finance” and “Project Planning and Design”, and “Labor and Personnel Issues”. Furthermore, predictive ML revealed that CME papers have a high probability of becoming high impact publications. In addition to that, the predictive ML results re-emphasized the outcomes of the performed descriptive assessment by reflecting the importance of “Contemporary Issues”, “Organizational Issues”, “Strategy, Decision Making, Risk, and Finance”, and “Labor and Personnel Issues” as emerging research topics with increased potential impact in the future. Ultimately, this paper benefits all CME stakeholders by quantitatively studying current research patterns, their interconnectivities, and future potential.