Research Trends in Pavement Management during the First Years of the 21st Century: A Bibliometric Analysis during the 2000–2013 Period

Abstract

A bibliometric analysis based on Scopus database was carried out to identify the global research trends related to pavement management area from 2000 to 2013, and to improve the understanding of the research topics in that period. The results reveal two stable periods of annual publications, from 2000 to 2002 with an average rate of 27, and from 2003 to 2010 with a value of 51; and a period with an increasing production rate of 20 publications per year after 2010. According to the document-type distribution, articles and conference papers have almost the same contribution. The most productive country was the United States, followed by Canada and China. The research trend in the field of pavement management could be grouped into three main areas. The first one is related to pavement management systems, which attracted the greatest attention, especially optimization processes with various objectives and lifecycle cost analysis. The second group is about pavement performance modeling, where calibration of mechanical empirical models was largely developed. Lastly, data collection had also occupied several papers, mainly about cracking classification. Sustainability aspects in pavement management became an emergent issue. The trending issues in that period, in these categories, were summarized in the paper.

IRI Performance Models for Flexible Pavements in Two-Lane Roads until First Maintenance and/or Rehabilitation Work

“…On the other hand, it can be stated that pavement design, especially in North America, has shifted from an empirical approach to mechanistic-empirical (M-E) approach [64]. As a consequence of this trend, the Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG) was published in 2008 [65], and updated in 2015 with a 2nd edition [66].…”

Improving Bibliographic Coupling with Category-Based Cocitation

“…BCCCC is a better tool for the domain experts to prioritize those articles that report conclusive results on the same associations. The article prioritization service provided by BCCCC can also be used to improve those bibliometric techniques that analyze articles about specific topics obtained by a keyword-based search (e.g., using the topic names and their related terms as keywords to get articles about equipment maintenance [4], pavement management [16], and pollution by particulate matter [17]). With the keyword-based search, many articles that do not focus on the topics may be retrieved, and conversely, many articles that focus on the topics may not be retrieved.…”

“…Computation of recall requires the number of highly related articles that should be retrieved. This number can be seen as the highly related articles in B T (see denominators of Equations (14) and (16), and if there is no highly related articles in B T , the target article a T is excluded from the experiment), because BCCCC recommends all articles in B T , while PMS may only recommend some of them (as noted above). Recall of BCCCC is thus always 1.0 (see Equation 16…”

Alternatives for Chemical and Biochemical Lignin Valorization: Hot Topics from a Bibliometric Analysis of the Research Published During the 2000–2016 Period

“…A bibliometric analysis provides effective tools to assess research trends on a scientific topic. This method has been broadly applied to analyze the scientific production and trends in numerous engineering fields [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. The main objective of this work was to carry out a bibliometric analysis of the research publications regarding lignin valorization during the period from 2000 to 2016.…”