Identifying the gaps in construction megaproject management research: a bibliographic analysis

Abstract

The worldwide growth of megaprojects has triggered an increasing number of academic publications in the past few decades. However, there are few studies drawing the whole picture of construction megaproject management. This study aims to investigate the status and identify research implications of construction megaproject management by conducting a systematic review. A total of 155 journal articles in 2007-2018 were identified and analysed, mainly using a bibliographic analysis on annual circulation, major journals, research origins, and categories of research interests. Results indicated that IJPM, JME, PMJ, FEM, JCEM, Sustainability, PICE-MPL and ECAM are the major journals, and developed regions/countries such as the United Kingdom rather than developing regions/countries such as mainland China are the dominant contributors in this field. Ten categories of research interests on megaproject management were also displayed and respectively discussed in depth. Moreover, three implications for future research, namely, 'construction megaproject research in developing areas', 'human factors in construction megaproject research' and 'external complexity in construction megaproject research', were proposed. The clear picture of existing literature might provide insights for academic research into megaproject management. Besides, the frontiers of megaproject research could equip practitioners with updated problem-solving strategies and then facilitate faster development in megaproject management.

Complexity, leadership, and megaproject performance: A configuration analysis

“…Between 2000 and 2010, several prominent project and engineering management journals included only 4.7 % of 85 studies examining megaproject complexities (Hu, Chan, Le & Jin, 2015). This result is consistent with a study conducted by Wang, Chan, He, and Xu (2020), who noted a gap in megaproject studies conducted between 2007 and 2018, identifying that only 7.2 % of 145 studies focused on complexity management.…”

Megaproject Management Research: The Status Quo and Future Directions

“…These include social network analysis [138], system dynamic models [76], and partial least squares structural equation models. By applying these newly developed mathematical techniques and theoretical approaches, the multiple elements, complexity, and dynamics of megaproject management can be explained to better advance the research on megaproject management theory [34,138]. Therefore, the increasing trend of research will become more apparent in the future by adopting different research approaches in megaproject management.…”

“…It can avoid the impalpable and arbitrary result. Therefore, the analysis showed that the identified papers could be categorized into five clusters: megaproject management in general [29,[116][117][118][119], megaproject sustainability [27,34,[120][121][122][123], megaproject governance [22,[124][125][126][127][128][129], megaproject investment and finance [44,48,92,[130][131][132], and megaproject risk management [95,112,[133][134][135][136]. When the topic of a paper was related to multiple clusters, the paper was classified into the most closely related cluster.…”

“…A literature review is generally considered an important methodology for critically analyzing research and inspiring the trend of research on a given subject. Yuan et al (2011) and Wang et al (2020) adopted similar methods for analyzing the research on construction and demolition waste management and sustainability in megaprojects [33,34]. These reviews have provided clear and complete analyses of the research from different perspectives in these disciplines and have also explored the future research directions, avoiding the duplication of research efforts.…”

Application of fiber optics in water distribution networks for leak detection and localization: a mixed methodology-based review

“…All these applications are capable of creating and depicting basic bibliometric networks; however, VOSviewer was selected for our study due to the ease of use, easy interpretability of networks through visualization, and the popularity of the software in engineering and management research (Tariq et al 2020). Science mapping analysis has already been employed in different research areas, such as construction safety (Akinlolu et al 2020), megaprojects (Wang et al 2020), and acoustic-based leak localization (Hu et al 2021), which has yielded meaningful research outcomes including (1) working linkages and measurements between researchers, countries, and organizations and (2) preliminary ideas on the existing research themes and future research directions (Tariq et al 2020). In our study, VOSviewer was used for science mapping of journal sources, contributing countries, and popular keywords.…”