Trend of the Research on Public Funded Projects

Abstract

As one of the main means to deliver service, Public Funded Projects (PFPs) always play a vital part in the development of the human society. Accordingly, research interests concerning PFPs from the construction industry have led to a great number of published papers during the past decades. Aimed at identifying the emerging research trend of researches addressing PFP issues, this study obtained target publications from selected international journals, and analyzed those articles in terms of the number of annual publications, authors and affiliations as main contributors, popular research themes, and preferred research methods. This study indicated that the number of PFP articles have been increasing, which could imply the growing importance of PFPs to the construction industry at large. What is more, the findings suggest that researchers from the United States are the most active in this discipline, followed by those from the United Kingdom, Australia, China, Hong Kong and Spain. And the origins of productive affiliations follow a similar way. With respect to emerging hot research topic, integration research, delivery method, sustainable exploration, governance issue, financial concern, performance study, risk management and decision-making challenges tend to attract more concerns of researchers within this discipline. Meanwhile, it was also found that the target articles of this study can be catalogued into three groups, field report, theoretical analysis, and quantitative calculation respectively. In addition, more vigorous modeling and simulation techniques such as stochastic frontier regression modeling and fuzzy synthetic evaluation simulation have been adopted in related researches. Moreover, investigations of content analysis also exhibit that sustainability should be the essential characteristic of PFPs, but there is still a long way to go concerning current sustainability performance of most PFPs. More relative research efforts are needed to ensure a sustainable development of PFPs as well as the construction industry.