Research Hotspots and Development Trends on Recycled Construction Materials in Pavement Engineering: A Bibliometric Evaluation

Abstract

Road recycling technology is gradually becoming a research focus in road construction due to natural resource shortages. It is therefore necessary to carry out deep and extensive analysis of the huge amount of publications in the research area of recycling technology in road construction. Based on three databases (Web of Science, Compendex and Scopus) and VOSviewer visualization software, this study conducts a bibliometric analysis of the literature in the field of recycled construction materials in pavement engineering. The global research publications were reviewed to quantitatively identify the literature characteristics. A number of publications, document types, research areas and keywords were used to achieve the general statistics of this reviewed literature. H-index, publication number and citations per publication were used to evaluate the academic contributions by country, institution and journal. The results show that the most productive country and institution for publications are the USA and Chang’an University from China, respectively, followed by China and Wuhan University of Technology. In recent years, researchers have generally paid attention to two main approaches: the application of rubber modified asphalt and the performance enhancement of recycled pavement.

Special Issue on Silicate Solid Waste Recycling

“…This might be the reason that five papers out of thirteen focus on the recycling techniques in pavement engineering. Chang reported a bibliometric evaluation on the recent research activities on recycled construction materials in pavement engineering [ 13 ]. The research hotspots and development trends of pavement engineering were then forwarded by claiming that the rubber modified asphalt binder and reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) attracted the most attention.…”