# Towards Future BIM Technology Innovations: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Literature
## 3 Methodology  
[PERSON] et al. [29] argued for the necessity of shifting attention from disparate studies to more precise reviews of BIM literature. Hence, this article aims to identify which technologies are excellent candidates to function along with BIM. Currently, there is no thorough investigation concentrating on understanding how certain cutting-edge technologies are complementing BIM to realise its full potential and whether there is any likelihood of fusing more than one technology to support BIM. The research can cover a wide range of topics and involves many technologies. However, this paper is not meant to be exclusive. To restrict the scope of this article, eight research topics have been chosen: AI, CC, Ontology, BC, DA, IoT, LS, and ML. These technologies have the potential to help with the usage of BIM during the whole lifecycle of a building, which in turn can assist with taking a further step to reach BIM's full potential. Further discussion of these technologies, their links with BIM, and the related research will be presented in this paper. This article methodology, as illustrated in Figure 1, comprises five main stages: paper retrieval (stage 1), which include the initial total number of articles retrieved, followed by the removal of irrelevant publications, which includes two stages (2 and 3), where only specific types of publications and the relevant categories are selected, respectively. In stage 4, a bibliometric analysis is conducted, followed by a discussion (stage 5). Further details of these stages are as followings:  
1. Paper Retrieval. The literature exploration was performed on WoS database since it has more than 71 million records and over 10 million conference papers. The search was based on keywords using the OR and AND operators search benchmark. For instance, ((BIM OR Building Information Modelling) AND ((artificial intelligence OR AI) OR (cloud computing) OR (ontology) OR (blockchain) OR (data analytics OR DA) OR (internet of things OR IoT) OR (laser scanning) OR (machine learning))). The research involves an analysis of articles issued from 2010 to 2019 (ending on 2 nd May). The result of the first stage was 4788 research publications. 2. Removal of irrelevant publications (stage 2). The aim behind refining the search is to remove a large amount of irrelevant data that might not contribute to this study. The collected papers were based on the available articles, proceedings, and reviews since these sorts of documents can provide a comprehensive view of the existing research [27]. Furthermore, only publications in English were collected since VOSviewer(r)[30], which is a software tool established by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University that is used for the analysis of scientometric data, supports only English documents. A total of 4713 papers were identified. 3. Removal of irrelevant publications (stage 3). New groups were selected for this article, besides the ones identified by [27], such as multidisciplinary engineering, management, and ontology. The final literature volume was 679 papers. In the WoS database, bibliographic data can be downloaded for at most 500 publications at a time. Thus, the documents were retrieved in two files. For each publication, the full record, including cited references, was obtained by using the \"tab-delimited format\" that is supported by VOSviewer(r). 4. Bibliometric Analysis. Due to the enormous expansion in research, it is challenging to analyse papers manually. Hence, the VOSviewer(r) was utilised as the analysis tool in this study, and a common quantitative and qualitative method was used to categorise and evaluate the literature. The software supports distance-based maps and allows the user to choose the type of analysis. Five types of analysis exist in this software, co-authorship analysis, co-occurrence analysis, citation analysis, bibliographic coupling analysis, and co-citation analysis. Each of these can be used to deliver a specific need and focus.