Eleven years of arcom: Bibliometric mapping of studies published between 2005 and 2016

This paper presents the results of a science mapping analysis of the body of knowledge published in proceedings of Association of Researchers in Construction Management (ARCOM) conference. The study aims at highlighting the intellectual discourse that has occurred and emerged from ARCOM within the last 11 years. To this end, the network of 1505 studies published in the proceedings of ARCOM and the 20831 studies associated with them through citations were examined. This was through scientometric analysis of the network of co-occurring terms and citations as a quantitative reproducible procedure in which minimal subjective judgment is involved. The findings show that the most cited published studies are clustered into 11 core research areas. The 4 largest areas were allocated to “project management”, “information management”, “procurement” and “construction stakeholders”. Besides, the information flow between ARCOM and journals was visualised. This revealed that published studies in ARCOM are mostly influenced by journals allocated to managerial areas of construction management as well as management and business journals while technology and engineering journals have the least level of influence. By providing a view from a meta-perspective, the study contributes to the field by exploring the entire intellectual core of the body of knowledge published in ARCOM after 2005. The findings of this study suggest that innovations such as building information modelling, augmented reality and use of big data are not currently included among the core research areas published in ARCOM. In essence, publications in ARCOM have for the most part focused on theoretical and managerial areas of innovations where practical and technological features and applications of innovative methodologies have remained invisible. Through exposing such areas in need of extra attention, directions for future research themes and grounds for fostering collaboration efforts are unearthed.