Digital Technologies and the Circular Economy in Construction: A Network-Analytic Scientometric Review of Intellectual Structure, Structural Integration and Thematic Acceleration

Purpose – This study maps the intellectual structure of research on digital technologies for the circular economy (CE) in construction, moving beyond descriptive science mapping to a formal network-analytic diagnosis of how the field is structurally integrated and how its themes are accelerating. Design/methodology/approach – A corpus of 421 Scopus-indexed documents (2013–2026) was analysed through bibliometric performance analysis, keyword co-occurrence mapping in VOSviewer, and a reconstructed co-occurrence network subjected to multi-measure centrality analysis, cluster-cohesion estimation, modularity computation, and temporal emergence detection. Findings – The field is expanding at a compound annual rate of 73 per cent (corpus h-index 46). Betweenness-centrality analysis reveals a hub-and-spoke architecture in which circular economy is the singular structural bridge (betweenness 0.98) while all other nodes approach zero, despite high network density (0.81) and uniformly high degree centrality. Cluster-cohesion analysis shows that the material-recovery cluster is weakly integrated (cohesion 0.18) relative to the circular-digital and life-cycle clusters (0.46 and 0.48). Emergence analysis identifies sustainable building, environmental management, and life-cycle assessment as the most accelerated frontiers. Originality/value – This is a scientometric review of the field to combine multi-measure centrality, cluster-cohesion estimation, and temporal emergence detection, providing a structurally rigorous account that distinguishes the field's integrative core from its weakly bonded periphery and identifies outcome quantification as its decisive frontier.