Classification of articles and journals on project control and earned value management

• Journal selection procedure, discriminating between high-quality journals and more popular business magazines.
• Classification according to six classes, each representing a typical and crucial aspect of a research paper.
• Identification of current research trends and possible gaps for future research.

This paper presents an overview of the existing literature on project control and earned value management (EVM), aiming at fulfilling three ambitions. First, the journal selection procedure allows to discern between high-quality journals and more popular business magazines. Second, the collected papers on project control and EVM, published in the selected journals, are classified based on a framework consisting of six distinct classes. Third, the classification framework indicates current trends and potential areas for future research, which can be summarized as follows: (i) increased attention to the stochastic nature of projects, (ii) enhanced validation of the proposed methodology using a large historical dataset or a simulation experiment, (iii) expansion of integrated control models, focusing on time and cost as well as other factors such as quality and sustainability, and (iv) development and validation of corrective action procedures.