Exploring International Research Status And Research Trend Of Construction Contract

Construction contract is a major research area of construction management worldwide and significant literature has been dedicated to research studies on contract over the past 17 years,but there appears to be a lack of systematically summarizing what they have already provided.Consequently,this paper aims to explore,analyze,investigate and summarize the research status and trends in contract research in construction.On the basis of a three-stage rigorous and in-depth literature review,a total of 1036 papers these papers published from 2000 to 2016 were identified from nine selected leading academic journals in the construction field at first,then 103 contract studies were selected through group screening,bibliometric analysis was then conducted based on their publication information and research contribution,at last a series of content analyses of the selected papers were conducted in terms of their research topics,research methods and theoretical foundations.From the critical analysis of the reported literature,it revealed that,in general,the number of contract related publications in these journals has been increasing,with half of all ths selected papers published in the latest five years.The results of the content analysis also indicate that research in contract primarily focuses on three areas ‘General research on contract',‘Research on pre-contract' and ‘Research on post-contract'.Specially,the research topic of ‘Contract duration in contract design' is the most frequently investigated one in these seventeen years.The content analysis also found that ‘Questionnaire' is the most favored research method.It was also found that contract researchers tend to use the transaction cost theory as the theoretical foundation most often.Eventually,the future research directions were determined next and the review of these studies discovered eleven research directions as the future research agenda.The main contribution of this paper is that it explicitly presents some valuable implications of contract which can benefit both researchers and practitioners,and reveal significant findings to enhance future research or implementation.