A quick country-level bibliometric survey of architecture and built environment research

While browsing feeds from journals in my main research fields, architecture and the built environment, I have noticed a very strong trend: the proportion of studies from China appears to be rising quickly. I decided to investigate further and assemble some numbers and graphs, without attempting to produce a full bibliometric study.

The first step was compiling a list of journals that, not being exhaustive, could be representative. This was my take:

It is worth noting that these journals are not guardians of truth but brand-driven outlets. They publish at high volume, process large numbers of submissions, and reject most of them. Although they are peer reviewed, novelty and fashionable terminology often outweigh everything else.

European countries are grouped together, including non-EU Switzerland.

First, we can plot the number of papers by country for each journal. Not all journals cover the same time span. What is clear is that, for journals with data from before COVID-19, publication volume rose sharply after the pandemic.

Contribution of number of published papers by country and by journal (architecture and built environment research field).

The next plot aggregates all journals and shows the relative contribution by country.

Relative contribution of number of published papers by country (architecture and built environment research field). The relative contribution of China notably increases since 2019.

I cannot comment on these trends beyond what is obvious from the plots. The broader causes lie outside the scope of this analysis. One concern, though, is that given China’s rise, national qualification agencies should revise their criteria for evaluating researchers. Publishing in Q1 journals has become markedly more difficult, so evaluation systems need adjustment. Not everyone can be in the first quartile, and if criteria are recalibrated accordingly, this is unproblematic.

I also fail to see why publishers such as MDPI are routinely labelled predatory when these Elsevier journals have also expanded their volumes and charge substantial amounts of public money. I do not see a significant difference between the two giants.

This is a good moment to recall Goodhart’s law: ‘When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.’ When impact becomes the target, researchers game the system by chasing fads, buzzwords and extreme specificity, often at the expense of socially important and urgent topics.

Data from Scopus® (Elsevier), used under licence and analysed by the author.

Dataset available here

Marimo notebook available here