Sustainability in the construction industry: A systematic review of the literature

Abstract The construction industry is criticized for causing adverse impacts on the environment. To minimize these impacts, the industry has been seeking to introduce sustainable practices throughout its entire production chain. Therefore, the objective of this study is to run a quantitative bibliometric research through meta-analysis methodology and, consequently, to evaluate the articles used by qualitative methods in the area of sustainability in civil construction. For this, a search was carried out on the Web of Science. Thus, a set of keywords was used, followed by a filtering method, resulting in a review of 433 articles published in 18 years. VOSviewer software was used in the quantitative analysis of documents. The results demonstrated a lack of quantitative methodologies to assess sustainability in the civil construction industry. Thus, this research presents the evolution of studies, the main areas addressed, the main certifications and methodologies for environmental assessment, and the distribution of the on-site work stages in articles. This revealed the main contributions found in the literature, presenting the article’s focus, being as main areas explored material, project management, sustainability assessment, and energy; the most used methodology (LCA) and environmental certification (LEED). It was seen that the social and economic pillars are less frequently tackled when compared to the environmental one. It was also perceived that most of the papers focus on the planning and execution stages of the on-site work, being necessary to develop more studies on operation and maintenance stages. These results serve as a source of reference for future research.