A review of research on embodied energy of buildings using bibliometric analysis

The share of embodied energy within the total life cycle of a building is expected to increase and become more significant as low energy and net-zero energy buildings become the norm. In the last two decades, many researchers have studied the embodied energy of buildings and published their findings. However, a comprehensive, quantitative analysis of the literature on the embodied energy of buildings is missing. In this study, in order to provide a better understanding of the field as a whole, a bibliometric approach is applied to create a knowledge map and discover more information about the topic. The primary knowledge structure and the topics for study were discovered by analyzing the keywords and abstract terms of 398 papers published from 1996 to 2015. The results show that life cycle assessment is the keyword with the greatest frequency of occurrence and design is the keyword that has the highest number of co-occurrence relationships with other keywords in the 398 papers. The major three research areas for the embodied energy of buildings are life cycle assessment (LCA), building design, and greenhouse gas emissions. By using the bibliometric method, this study analyzes previous studies to provide new insights into the embodied energy of buildings.