Mapping the dynamics of China’s prefabricated building policies from 1956 to 2019: a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Compared to buildings constructed in situ, prefabricated buildings (PBs) offer many environmental benefits in terms of carbon emissions, energy consumption, material consumption, and waste generation. To mitigate adverse impacts by the building sector on the environment, PBs have been widely applied in many countries. Although PB policies (PBPs) have played a significant role in guiding, supporting, and promulgating China's PB development, few studies have systematically investigated these PBPs. As a result, the evolution of PBPs in China is not clear, which limits practitioners' overall understanding of PBPs. To bridge this knowledge gap, a bibliometric analysis method was employed to review 136 PBPs issued in China from 1956 to 2019. Through text mining, a co-word network analysis, and a collaboration network analysis, we mapped, visualized, and described the PBP system over time. The evolution of PBPs can be divided into four phases: exploration (1956-1995), fluctuation (1996-2005), steady improvement (2006-2015), and rapid growth (2016-2019). Our findings indicate that the PB policy targets, policy objects, policy tools, performance indicators, and the collaboration structure of policymaking agencies have changed significantly across these phases. Lastly, the PB experience in China was compared with those of countries exhibiting higher levels of PB development, which can serve as a reference for PB development.

Investigating the Dynamics of China’s Green Building Policy Development from 1986 to 2019

“…In the “Green Building and Green Ecological Urban Development Planning” (hereinafter referred to as the “Planning”), MOHURD [ 64 ] proposed six suggestions to accelerate the development of the GB industry during the 12th Five-Year Plan period, including the use of prefabrication technology. In conclusion, similar to the study of Wang et al [ 31 ], a strong linkage between “green building” and “prefabrication technology” appeared in stage 3. In addition, in the “Planning,” MOHURD [ 64 ] proposed to formulate green building evaluation standards suitable for different climate regions and building types during the 12th Five-Year Plan period.…”

“…A review of the GBPs issued from 1986 to 2019 showed that a total of 14 agencies participated, as shown in Table 1 . Since the names of some government agencies have changed in the past 34 years, to avoid confusion, similar to the study by Wang et al [ 31 ], this paper adopted the latest names of these agencies.…”

“…The policy documents investigated in this research were retrieved from three official websites and two well-known databases. The three official websites included the Central Government, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development (MOHURD), and the National Development and Reform Commission, which are usually used to publish national-level policies related to the building sector [ 31 ]. The two databases, namely, the Magic Weapon of Peking University and the China’s National Knowledge Infrastructure database [ 32 ], were selected to serve as supplementary retrieval databases to ensure the integrity of data collection.…”

“…This method has been applied in some previous studies related to policy analysis, and its effectiveness has been well confirmed [ 41 , 42 , 43 ]. Compared with qualitative research, bibliometric analysis reduces the dependence on researchers’ knowledge and experience and makes the research results more repeatable and verifiable [ 31 , 41 ]. Bibliometric analysis mainly includes five specific methods: bibliographical coupling, co-citation analysis, citation analysis, co-author analysis, and co-word analysis [ 40 , 44 ].…”

Characterizing the patterns of China's policies against COVID-19: A bibliometric study

“…For example, co-word analysis is applied to map the topics of science and technology policies via manually labeling topics of each policy document and selecting high-frequency keywords ( Huang et al, 2015 ). It was also used to visualize the interactions among different keywords from 136 prefabricated buildings policies to describe prefabricated buildings policy system over time ( Wang et al, 2020 ). Zhou et al (2020) explored the characteristics of policy evolution of China's new energy vehicles industry using co-word analysis based on 154 policy documents from Chinese central government.…”