A review on the global communication research in construction: a bibliometric perspective

Communication among the stakeholders has critical influences on the knowledge sharing among them and overall performance of construction projects. However, a comprehensive review on communication in construction is absent, leading to a poor understanding on the research status and future research directions in this field. This research, therefore, aims to conduct a review on global communication research in construction from a bibliometric perspective. CiteSpace software was used to visualize and analyze the papers related to communication in construction in Web of Science Core Collection from 2015 to 2024. 189 English papers were screened and then analyzed. The results indicate that the number of construction communication papers has been generally increasing in recent years. Although researchers have shown significant interests in communication issues pertaining to management, performance, and model, the research hotspot areas have evolved over the past two five-year periods. Six important clusters were identified including building information modeling, construction industry, social network analysis, safety communication, and others. Research limitations within the topics and methods, along with future directions, were discussed in depth based on the analysis results. The insights obtained from this paper are valuable for researchers to embark on further research on communication in construction in the future.