Towards a New Paradigm of Project Management: A Bibliometric Review

Abstract

The advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) has triggered a digital transformation across several industries, including the project management (PM) profession. To achieve competitive advantages, construction industry employers must now utilise technology and data for strategy development, project execution, and delivery. This study reviews the concept of PM through research published on the Elsevier Scopus database from 2010 to date using a sequence of bibliometric analyses. Keywords such as “project management” AND “project management tools” AND “project management techniques” AND “construction industry” AND “built environment” were used for article extraction. VOSviewer, a text-mining tool, was used to analyse the bibliometric connection in PM research within the built environment discipline. Through the sequencing of cluster analysis, the findings revealed that research focus is placed on sustainable development (SD), construction safety (CS), engineering education (EE), project management stakeholders (PMS), risk management (RM), and building information modelling (BIM). More so, the current research focus in PM studies is tending towards knowledge management (KM) and construction innovation (CI). Based on a critical review of extant literature, very few studies have bibliometrically analysed and visualised PM studies. This study sets out to fill this gap by examining the key areas of concentration in published works on the PM concept from 2010 to date. Despite the valuable contribution of this study to the PM body of knowledge, generalisations of the results must be made cautiously due to the use of a single database, which in this case is Elsevier Scopus.