# A Systematic Review of the Role of BIM in Building Sustainability Assessment Methods
## 3 Methodology  
Facing the existing literature gap about the application of BIM to evaluate BSA methods criteria, the main objective of this study is to understand the actual practical implementation of BIM to evaluate BSA criteria. The goal is to identify which BSA criteria are available (and proved) to be assessed with BIM, as well as the most effective BIM software for such kind of analysis. It is also intended to analyse the topic trend in the past 10 years and the attractiveness level of BIM integration in the SBTool method, facing the two most known BSA schemes--LEED and BREEAM. Therefore, the following main research questions were established:  
* What is the actual practical implementation of BIM to assess BSA criteria?
* Which percentage of BSA criteria can be assessed with BIM?
* What is the BIM software commonly used to assess BSA criteria?
* Which are the most preferred journals by researchers on the topic?
* Facing the current integration of BIM in LEED and BREEAM, will a BIM-automated assessment for SBTool be attractive enough?  
To accurately answer the formulated research questions, a systematic review will be carried out, adapted from [PERSON] et al.'s [34] guide. Figure 1 summarises all the procedure sequences for this study. After the research question(s) definition, a preliminary search will be performed to identify similar review studies and establish the contribution of this study. Then, the search strategy will be defined in terms of scope and keyword combinations. This review will only focus on publications that directly address the practical assessment of, at least, one criterion from the selected BSA methods--LEED, BREEAM and SBTool. These BSA methods were selected as they provide the basis for all the other existing frameworks [3; 4].  
The research boundaries were defined by identifying the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The considered period is between 2009 and 2019. There were no restrictions regarding country of origin, BSA method version and applied BIM software, but only English language publications were considered. Publications for which the full text is unavailable and abstract only publications were excluded from the analysis.  
Regarding the database, Web of Science was chosen as a research engine, due to its broader citations database. It encompasses registers from most of the existing high-impact journals.  
By applying all the criteria, publications for consideration will be gathered and exported to a reference citation manager to remove duplications and for filtering. First by title and abstract reading and, then, by full-text reading. Finally, after identifying all the key publications for the research, a manual search will be performed to add a couple of publications about the topic that did not appear when using the selected keywords.  
To analyse all the results, the key publications will be organised through tables, covering the following information:  
* year of publication;
* title;
* journal;
* addressed BSA method;
* assessed criteria;
* adopted software.  
This data will be used to carry out a statistical analysis, where the following aspects will be identified: percentage of assessed credits from each BSA method, the most assessed categories, the most common applied software, the topic trend in the past 10 years and the journals with most publications on the topic. Based on the current state of implementation of BIM in LEED and BREEAM, the attractiveness of a BIM-based assessment for SBTool will be investigated, as well as the replicability level of the applied procedures in those schemes (when applicable).