Bibliometric Analysis of Literature on Building Retro-Commissioning

Buildings account for over one third of the global energy consumption. To optimize the energy use of buildings, retro-commissioning (RCx) as a systematic process to periodically check and improve existing buildings’ performance is helpful. While RCx has been increasingly promoted for adoption in buildings, its thorough implementation remains uncommon in practice, and the state of RCx research is unclear. Therefore, a comprehensive review of previous RCx studies was conducted through a bibliometric analysis of the literature. Following a systematic review approach, a total of 69 relevant research articles retrieved from ScienceDirect and Scopus were examined. The interconnections among the regions, journals and keywords of the articles were analyzed using the VOSviewer software. The analysis results reveal that the networks of the regions and journals are not extensive. While indicating the limited research on RCx, this finding implies the need for more effort to foster collaboration among regions and experts in this area. Furthermore, a network visualization of the articles’ keywords was obtained, which unveils the main themes of the past research work. As the first bibliometric analysis of literature on RCx, this study has portrayed a clear picture of the past and recent research endeavors in this field as well as future directions for RCx research.