A bibliometric review of maturity model studies in the construction industry

Maturity models have become one of the most used organisational maturity assessment tools in the construction industry. However, bibliometric and visual analysis for this field is still scarce. This study used CiteSpace to analyse 278 articles on maturity models employed in the construction industry from 2000 to 2022 in the Web of Science (WoS) core database. The categories in the WoS database divided the filtered articles into eight categories, which could be roughly divided into three fields: (1) Construction and Engineering, (2) Green Sustainability and Environment, and (3) Integrated Management. The keyword co-occurrence analysis based on frequency, centrality and burst strength revealed that “Building information modelling (BIM)”, “System” and “Impact” were relatively significant terms. This finding indicated that maturity models are a systematic assessment tool often used in the BIM domain. The analysis of the evolution of keywords also revealed that maturity-related research could be divided into five stages and that the application of maturity models at each stage focused on different areas within the construction industry. The analyses of the current review direct future research to focus more on the integration of green sustainability with other topics, explore new technologies, investigate the applicability of maturity theories and validation studies and conduct more action-oriented guided research. The results of this study guide researchers to utilise maturity models in the effort to systematically understand current research efforts and future trends of the tool in the construction industry, as well as provide references for managers of building construction companies and government personnel who develop policies for the construction industry.