# Insight from Review Articles of Life Cycle Assessment for Buildings
## 3 Results
### Scientometric Analysis
#### 3.1.2 Analysis of Article Sources  
Exploring the journal sources published in the LCA_B field reflects the most popular and suitable journal for publication, as displayed in Figure 4. In VOSviewer, the minimum number of papers was set to 2 and the minimum citation number was set to 10, 27 sources were finally obtained from the 72 sources identified. As a larger size of the nodes and fonts indicated a larger number of articles published in that journal, the most popular journal was observed to be _Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews_ with the highest publication number of 78 articles and the highest citation number of 10,162, followed by _Sustainability_ (publication number: 35, citation number: 1316), _Journal of Cleaner Production_ (publication number: 27, citation number: 2417), and _International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment_ (publication number: 20, citation number: 1125). In addition, a thick line  
Figure 3: Distribution of the 327 review studies from 2009 to 2025.  
between two nodes indicates a high frequency of citations between the two journals, and a long distance between the nodes indicates a weak link strength between the two journals. The publication period can be distinguished from the colors, and the recently published articles are shown in brighter colors. From the total link strength scores, as shown in Table 2, _Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews_ (the total link strength scores of 328) and _Building and Environment_ (the total link strength scores of 192) are the two most active journals in the research. Although the article number from _Environmental Chemistry Letters_, _Applied Energy_, and _Environmental Research Letters_ is less than 5, their impact on LCA-B research is the highest as reflected by the high number of citations.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c c} \hline \hline \multirow{2}{*}{**Journal**} & **Total Link Strength** & **Article Number** & **Citation Number** & **Norm. Citations 1** & **Avg. Citations** & **Avg. Norm. Citations 2** & **Avg. Pub. Year 3** \\ \hline _Environmental Chemistry Letters_ & 8 & 4 & 1106 & 35.5 & 276.5 & 8.9 & 2023 \\ \hline _Applied Energy_ & 37 & 2 & 710 & 5.0 & 355.0 & 2.5 & 2016 \\ \hline _Environmental Research Letters_ & 16 & 3 & 365 & 4.2 & 121.7 & 1.4 & 2019 \\ \hline _Building and Environment_ & 192 & 18 & 1329 & 22.6 & 73.8 & 1.3 & 2020 \\ \hline _Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews_ & 328 & 78 & 10,162 & 85.8 & 130.3 & 1.1 & 2016 \\ \hline _Journal of Cleaner Production_ & 122 & 27 & 2417 & 28.9 & 89.5 & 1.1 & 2019 \\ \hline _Sustainable Cities and Society_ & 26 & 3 & 252 & 3.0 & 84.0 & 1.0 & 2020 \\ _Science of the Total Environment_ & 13 & 3 & 236 & 3.0 & 78.7 & 1.0 & 2019 \\ \hline _Energy and Buildings_ & 153 & 17 & 2389 & 16.6 & 140.5 & 1.0 & 2019 \\ \hline _Journal of Environmental Management_ & 22 & 7 & 631 & 6.6 & 90.1 & 0.9 & 2019 \\ \hline _Construction and Building Materials_ & 3 & 4 & 223 & 3.8 & 55.8 & 0.9 & 2021 \\ \hline _Journal of Building Engineering_ & 33 & 4 & 283 & 3.7 & 70.8 & 0.9 & 2019 \\ \hline _International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment_ & 32 & 20 & 1125 & 16.8 & 56.3 & 0.8 & 2020 \\ \hline _Sustainability_ & 141 & 35 & 1316 & 27.9 & 37.6 & 0.8 & 2020 \\ \hline _Waste Management_ & 14 & 2 & 160 & 1.5 & 80.0 & 0.8 & 2019 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 2: Journal source analysis of LCA-B review articles.  
Figure 4: Visualization of article’s sources.