A bibliometric analysis of research trends in life cycle assessment of fresh concrete and mortar during 1997-2021.

Abstract

The construction industry relies heavily on concrete as a fundamental material. According to the shift towards environmental sustainability in recent years, studies on life cycle assessment (LCA) of concrete and mortar and reducing their environmental impacts have increased significantly. This paper provides insights into studies performed in LCA of fresh concrete and mortar until 2021 by using a bibliometric method. To achieve this goal, 283 documents were selected from the Scopus database for bibliometric analysis. VOSviewer and Publish or Perish tools were used to perform bibliometric analysis and data visualization. Various aspects of existing documents, including top sources, countries, and authors, were analyzed. Citation analysis was conducted to identify articles with the most citations. Co-occurrence analysis has been used for analyzing keywords to identify research trends and future research directions. The number of studies in this area has grown significantly in recent years, according to the results. Among all subject areas, engineering and environmental science are recognized as the main areas of existing researches. Journal of Cleaner Production is one of the leading journals in this field. Among the productive countries, the USA is recognized as the leader. However, de Brito J. from Portugal is the most prolific author in this field. The most influential document in this field was written by Habert et al., which includes the highest citations among all documents. Keyword analysis indicates that "Fly Ash" has the most occurrence among all keywords. However, "Recycled Aggregates" recorded the highest annual average growth rate in recent years.