SCIENTOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT ASSESMENT RESEARCH IN THE AFRICAN CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY. CSV File

This study has employed a scientometric methodology to conduct a systematic analysis of the intellectual organization, thematic development, and collaborative networks of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) research in the African construction industry. In accordance with the methodological blueprint introduced by Olawumi and Chan (2018), to construct a comprehensive and objective mapping of the research area, the study used a science mapping approach, a combination of quantitative bibliometric techniques and visual network analysis.
The Scopus database was chosen as the main source of data because of its proven reliability and a larger number of publications related to construction than other bibliographic databases (Olawumi and Chan, 2018; Hosseini et al., 2018). The usage of Scopus has been embraced effectively in similar scientometric research in the field of construction management research such as green building (Darko et al., 2019), environmental health and safety (Kissi et al., 2024), and sustainable development (Olawumi and Chan, 2018), offering a valid and reliable precedent of its use in the current study. Data extraction involved a systematic search based on keywords using the Boolean operator AND and OR to combine search terms based on the environmental impact assessment and construction in Africa in the title, abstract, and keywords. The search was performed with no restrictions on the year of publication to allow capturing the entire history of the research field, and the final dataset of 367 bibliographic records after the implementation of inclusion and exclusion criteria. The dataset was restricted to peer-reviewed journal articles published in the English language in the engineering and environmental science subject areas, but not conference papers, book chapters, editorials, or non-English language articles to achieve analytical consistency.
The bibliographic information obtained was then exported from Scopus in comma-separated value (CSV) format and imported into VOSviewer (version 1.6.18) to perform scientometric analysis and network visualization. The choice of VOSviewer was driven by its proven ability to visualise networks by distance, its common usage in similar research, and its ability to work with large amounts of bibliographic data (Olawumi and Chan, 2018; Kissi et al., 2024). Four main analytical methods were used: Co-authorship analysis to map the collaboration relations between authors, institutions, and countries, keyword co-occurrence analysis to determine the prevailing research themes and thematic groups, co-citation analysis to determine the intellectual basis and knowledge base of the field, and lastly, bibliographic coupling analysis to determine clusters of publications that share common reference structures. A publication trend analysis was also conducted to examine the temporal development of EIA research contributions in the African construction context.