A Scientometric Review and Metasynthesis of Building Information Modelling (BIM) Research in Africa

Abstract

Building Information Modelling (BIM) has been gaining widespread adoption in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry across the globe. Consequently, several research studies have attempted to construct a holistic review of the increasing BIM publications to identify the development trend using manual review, scientometric review, bibliometric review, or latent semantic review. These extant studies have often adopted a global view of the development despite the adoption of BIM varying across firms, countries, and continents. This approach is often regarded as not representative of the BIM development in countries and continents at the infancy stage. As BIM is still at the germinating stage of development in Africa and previous reviews are unrepresentative of BIM development in the AEC industry of Africa. This paper aims to present a scientometric review and metasynthesis of BIM development in the African AEC industry to explore the intellectual evolution of BIM, the status quo of BIM across the regions, and any potential barriers hindering BIM proliferation. The review findings revealed a varying level of BIM growth, with North Africa, West Africa, and Southern Africa leading the research development, whilst East Africa and Central Africa are slightly lagging behind. Additionally, the major challenges facing BIM adoption was found as people/process-related barriers. This study has provided valuable insights into BIM development and application in the growing African AEC industry.

A Review and Scientometric Analysis of Global Building Information Modeling (BIM) Research in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) Industry

“…The research framework includes defining the literature database and search rules, conducting preliminary retrieval, data processing and analysis, as illustrated in Figure 1. The paper selection process in this study was referred to the methods used in other review articles (e.g., [4][5][6][7][8][9]).…”

A Review and Scientometric Analysis of Global Building Information Modelling (BIM) Research in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) Industry

“…The research framework includes defining literature database and search rules, conducting preliminary retrieval, data processing and analysis, as illustrated in Figure. 1. The paper selection process in this study was referred to the methods used in other review articles, such as [6,8,13].…”

“…There have only a few studies on regional and global BIM review. Among the handful, Saka and Chan [8] presented a scientometric review and metasynthesis of BIM development in the African AEC industry. They found a varying level of BIM growth in the African continent, with North Africa, West Africa, and Southern Africa leading the research development, while the other regions, namely the East Africa and Central Africa are lagging behind.…”

Effect of Short Fiber Reinforcements on Fracture Performance of Cement-Based Materials: A Systematic Review Approach

“…For the extraction of relevant articles from the Scopus database, the searched keywords included “concrete fracture properties,” “cementitious composite fracture properties,” “cement-based material fracture properties,” “fiber-reinforced concrete fracture,” and “hybrid fiber-reinforced concrete fracture.” In past studies, similar approaches were already adopted by researchers in various fields [ 66 , 67 ]. A scientometric review adopt science mapping, which is used by researchers for the analysis of bibliometric data for various purposes [ 68 ] and which reports the challenges faced by researchers while creating a relationship between keywords, authorship, and countries with manual reviews in specified research fields [ 69 ]. The relevant data from the Scopus were saved in comma separated values (CSV) format for further analysis using suitable software.…”