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11 February 2023

A Scientometric Study of LCA-Based Industrialization and Commercialization of Geosynthetics in Infrastructures

,
and
1
Department of Civil, Energy, Environmental and Material Engineering, Mediterranean University of Reggio Calabria, 89122 Reggio Calabria, Italy
2
Department of Mechanical, Energy and Management Enginering, University of Calabria, 87036 Rende, Italy
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Appl. Sci.2023, 13(4), 2328;https://doi.org/10.3390/app13042328
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Abstract

This study analyzes the scientific literature on Life Cycle Assessment-based (LCA-based) industrialization and commercialization of geosynthetics for infrastructures in the field of Industry 4.0, by applying a scientometric study. A set of articles published in Scopus was analyzed through both a quantitative and a qualitative approach. The results are reported in a framework where the main keywords, themes, and topics are identified and discussed. Such results include the analysis of emerging trends and convergence among different themes and topics. In fact, results from the current literature in this area are still evolving and reveal increasingly new trends and themes, opening up new and challenging research perspectives in terms of innovative applications. Moreover, this study identifies the main affiliations and countries contributing to this area, as well as the main collaboration networks among the most prominent authors and geographical areas, thus providing scholars, namely, early career ones, with an indication of the most relevant authors to connect with for their future studies.

1. Introduction

1.1. Context

Nowadays, many geosynthetics or similar products are utilized for buildings and infrastructures at large. However, in this work we will refer to geosynthetics stricto sensu as defined according to the EN ISO 10318-1 standard (available at: https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:10318:-1:ed-1:v1:en, accessed on 31 January 2023): geosynthetics is a “generic term describing a product, at least one of whose components is made from a synthetic or natural polymer, in the form of a sheet, a strip, or a three-dimensional structure, used in contact with soil and/or other materials in geotechnical and civil engineering applications”. This broad adoption is geared to achieve both a higher level of safety and security for users and a higher level for the services that are enabled by such buildings and infrastructures [1]. The research on such products has been largely integrated by recent analysis techniques and approaches based on data mining, deep learning, machine learning, artificial intelligence, etc. For instance, data mining has been utilized in order to investigate the capability of shear strength prediction for fiber-reinforced soils [2]. Moreover, extreme learning machine models have been used for predicting the ultimate bearing capacity of geosynthetics through a cost-effective approach [3]. Other studies have proposed different intelligent models for the assessment of the California bearing ratio and the dynamic response of geogrid reinforced foundation beds, such as artificial neural network, least median of squares regression, Gaussian processes regression, elastic net regularization regression, lazy K-star, M-5 model tress, alternating model trees, random forest [4,5]. Geosynthetic reinforced bridge abutments and repair techniques for highways slopes were assessed in recent studies as well [6,7]–e.g., in terms of deformation behavior, live willow poles, fiber reinforced soil, elektrokinetic geosynthetics in order to tackle the overall environmental impacts related to habitat and visual aspects [6,7]. Moreover, the traffic delays and the cost of traffic management were considered [6]. In fact, the previous literature did not take into account the long-term perspective, for instance, in terms of cradle-to-grave perspectives, thus, suggesting a literature gap [6]. In fact, the integration of long-term sustainable approaches into engineering research at large is urged as they became more and more key for better life and future [8]. For this purpose, comparative life cycle assessment studies were conducted on geosynthetic mechanically stabilized or retaining earth walls, geosynthetics based filter layers, and high bermless geogrid walls in seismic regions and geogrid reinforced roads, amongst others, thus, going beyond the sole-technology focus of some studies [8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31]. However, the current literature is still evolving and reveal increasingly new trends and theme, opening up new and challenging research perspectives in terms of innovative applications, thus, deserving further research efforts [1,6,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,16,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31], also considering an increasing relevance recognized by the industry side, as manufacturers and their suppliers aim at reducing environmental impacts of their civil engineering works and materials [16].

1.2. Motivations

Such evidences from the field literature highlight the need for a scientometric study focusing on the intersection of geosynthetics research, on the one side, and managerial aspects related to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Industry 4.0 approaches, on the other side. In fact, extant research [1,3,6] show how many technical, engineering, societal, environmental, safety, and economic implications are linked to the development of geosynthetics research and especially on the implications of their pervasive applications in the real world through infrastructures, building, roads, etc. [1,3,6]. Moreover, we identified the journal Applied Sciences as the best outlet for this research in order to make it clear to the readers how the ongoing discourse on geosynthetics is currently evolving and that it has multi-faceted implications on societal, economic and environmental fields, as the journal itself deals with material sciences, environmental sciences, sustainability, (civil and transportation) engineering. Based on such motivations, the purpose of our study is, firstly, to analyze the ongoing scientific discourse and integration of sustainable approaches to geosynthetics research, and, secondly, to provide a more systematized state-of-the-art in the field through a de facto standardized methodological approach for conducting data-driven scientometric study [32], as described in Section 2. However, we want to specify that the main purpose of this work is not conducting a technical analysis of engineering/material science research on geosynthetics, but to focus on managerial aspects and implications of the current contributions in the literature that take into account the societal, environmental and economic consequences of geosynthetics applications in the real world. Finally, this narrow scope of our study poses also some limitations, as we only considered the part of the literature on geosynthetics that is linked to managerial, commercial and societal implications and applications of geosynthetics, discarding the part that has only a technical relevance that is out of the scope of our study.

1.3. Methods

In detail, the methodological steps conducted in this study are as follows: the most cited papers have been identified by means of a search query in Scopus database, then, such papers have been analyzed manually, in order to check their belonging to the scope of the research and to avoid any misleading attribution to it.
This work relies on extant methodological approaches adopted in other studies [33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41] and has been conducted by using the Bibliometrix and Biblioshiny libraries in RStudio [32].
Relevant papers/authors are identified based not only on total/cumulated citation, but also on the normalized results that consider the recency of some works/authors that have cumulated a relevant amount of citations in a shorter time.
This work is structured as follows: Section 2 deepens the methodological aspects of the scientometric study; Section 3 reports the results of the quantitative approach; Section 4 delves into the qualitative discussion of the results and summarizes the main conclusions, including limitations and theoretical implications, paving new research avenues in the field.

2. Methods

This work proposes a scientometric study on geosynthetic products for both buildings and infrastructures at large, realized through a Life-Cycle-Assessment approach, in the field of Industry 4.0 and machine/deep learning production. As a first step, all the co-authors identified and read the most relevant works in the literature in order to choose the best search strategy overall. Then, they selected and combined the terms to be utilized and combined for the extraction of relevant documents from the Scopus database with an iterative process. In particular, the following search terms have been utilized in the search strategy: geosynthetic*, life cycle assessment, LCA, cradle-to-grave, industry 4.0, machine learning, deep learning, The search terms were restricted to the Scopus subject areas “Business, Management and Accounting”, “Social Sciences”, “Decision Sciences” and “Economics, Econometrics and Finance”, and to documents published in English as articles or reviews.
The selection of the Scopus database is motivated by the fact that other data sources like ISI Web of Science (WoS) or Google Scholar (GS) are not suitable for the proposed scientometric study. In fact, WoS is too smaller and its content is too unexhaustive and restricted to leading journals which may lead to a mis-/under-representation of the overall ongoing discourse on an increasing field like corporate-startup collaboration [33,34,35]. On the other side, GS provides a much wider base of analysis, with a larger number of documents indexed, which constitutes a starting point for the literature discovery, but includes also no- or low-quality and non-peer-reviewed documents–e.g., working papers, student assignments [34,36,37,38,39,40,41].
The final search identified 198 documents: the most relevant ones were selected by performing a qualitative, manual analysis of their contents in order to check their actual belonging to the relevant subject of this paper, and avoid any misattribution due to the utilization of overlapping keywords. The final step of the screening process was conducted through RStudio and the Bibliometrix package through the Biblioshiny app [32]. Descriptive data on the final dataset are provided in Table 1 and Table 2 and Figure 1.
Table 1. Dataset descriptive data.
Table 2. Annual production data.
Figure 1. Annual scientific production.

3. Results and Discussion

This section is divided into paragraphs, whereas different facets of the bibliometric analysis are reported, and the corresponding contributions to the scientometric study are discussed.

3.1. Country of Publication Analysis

The scope we refer to when mentioning “the most productive/collaborative country”, “the scientific impact and relevance of countries’ scientific contribution” et similia, is about geosyinthetics research entrenched with managerial implications, as papers considered in this study and explained in both the Introduction and Methods sections. The most productive countries in the world are reported in Figure 2, where the darker is the blue, the higher is the country’s scientific production. The results show that China, U.S.A., India, Australia and Brazil are the top five scientific contributors in terms of publication (see also Table 3 for a complete list of countries’ contribution worldwide).
Figure 2. Countries’ scientific production on geosyinthetics research entrenched with managerial implications, as considered in this study. The most productive countries have the darkest blue, the least productive have the lightest blue, while grey is for non-productive countries.
Table 3. Countries’ scientific production on geosyinthetics research entrenched with managerial implications, as considered in this study.
However, the number of publications is not the sole indicator to be analyzed, as the scientific impact and relevance of countries’ scientific contribution should be evaluated by considering also the citations. Hence, Table 4 and Figure 3 report the results of citations of countries’ publications worldwide. USA, Portugal, Australia, Japan and China are the top five countries in this list, showing that the most productive countries and the most cited countries show partly different results.
Table 4. Citations of countries’ scientific production on geosyinthetics research entrenched with managerial implications, as considered in this study.
Figure 3. Citations of countries’ scientific production on geosyinthetics research entrenched with managerial implications, as considered in this study.
Finally, as for global scientific collaborations, the main cross-country relationships and knowledge exchange flows involve the following couples: China–USA, China–Australia, France-United Kingdom, India–USA, Portugal–Australia ad USA Australia (see Table 5 and Table 6). However, Figure 4 and Figure 5 show that the global collaboration map is highly fragmented.
Table 5. Countries’ scientific collaboration on geosyinthetics research entrenched with managerial implications, as considered in this study.
Table 6. Distribution of authors’ production.
Figure 4. Countries’ scientific collaboration on geosyinthetics research entrenched with managerial implications, as considered in this study. The most collaborative countries have the darkest blue, the least collaborative have the lightest blue, while grey is for non-collaborative countries.
Figure 5. Countries’ scientific collaboration map on geosyinthetics research entrenched with managerial implications, as considered in this study.

3.2. Affiliations and Authors Analysis

Figure 6 proves that the most relevant author affiliations in terms of scientific production and impact are those related to the most productive and cited countries shown in Section 3.1., such as Portugal, China, Australia and USA.
Figure 6. Most relevant affiliations.
This result is coherent with the distribution of authors’ production according to Lotka’s Law [32] reported in Table 6 and Figure 7, whereas it is shown that most authors, namely 483, have written only one document, while 41 authors have written two articles and 13 authors have written three papers. Finally, only one or two authors have written four to seven papers, thus, showing that the scientific leadership globally is very fragmented, as the analysis of most relevant affiliations in Figure 6 has already shown.
Figure 7. Frequency distribution of authors’ production.
Moreover, a clear trend denoting an intensification of research efforts in the current academic community worldwide can be detected starting from 2014 on, as demonstrated by Figure 8. Likewise, citations trends have evolved in parallel, as most references in the historical direct citation network start from 2014 on (see Figure 9). Overall, the citations trends are shown in Table 7 and Figure 10.
Figure 8. Scientific production overtime.
Figure 9. Historical Direct Citation Network.
Table 7. Citations trends, total and per year.
Figure 10. Citations trends, total and per year.
Finally, despite the collaboration network (Figure 11) is highly clustered and siloised, such a fragmented collaborative scenario is still not reflected in the co-citation network (Figure 12).
Figure 11. Main authors’ collaboration network.
Figure 12. Authors’ co-citation network.

3.3. Source of Publication Analysis

As for the sources of publication, the review sample shows that most locally cited sources are different from the most relevant sources in the field, thus, suggesting how the ongoing literature on the subject of this study is being mainly developed on a sub-cluster of journals (see Figure 13, and Table 8). Such heterogeneity in terms of source ranking in Figure 13 is further supported by Bradford’s Law that ranks the publication sources and articles according to the source log (rank) [32], whereas, only the two most relevant journals represent the core sources of the overall publication field (see Figure 14 and Table 9). Finally, Figure 15 and Figure 16 show how the different sources have evolved over time with reference to the subject of this scientometric study, highlighting how the most relevant sources are the ones that have published more studies on the field, coherently with Figure 13.
Figure 13. Most locally cited sources.
Table 8. Sources’ local impact.
Figure 14. Core (ranked) publication sources.
Table 9. Source clustering through Bradford’s Law.
Figure 15. Source dynamics per year.
Figure 16. Cumulated source dynamics.

3.4. Keywords, Themes and Topics Analysis

As for the semantic analysis of the contents of the research field, we have deepened the keywords utilized as the very first step. Then, we moved to the analysis of themes and topics of the research field.
When looking at Figure 17, Figure 18 and Figure 19, we notice that the topic dendrogram identifies two clusters of keywords, that are related to bridge abutments, shake table test, seismic loading, and geosynthetic reinforced soil, on the one side, while they are related to all other topics and themes in the field, on the other side (Figure 17). Such a division among keywords clusters is further supported by the reference-keyword-keyword plus 3-field plot (Figure 18), which identifies geosynthetics, geogrids, and road engineering as the main keyword fields, while they can, however, be divided as keywords contributing mainly to the generic geosynthetics research stream, but also to the geosynthetics materials and reinforcement topic clusters. Finally, when analyzing the co-occurrence network, we find that the two main centers of aggregation of co-occurring keywords are those related to geosynthetics and road engineering (Figure 19).
Figure 17. Topic dendrogram.
Figure 18. 3-field plot.
Figure 19. Co-occurrence network.
Moreover, the Factorial analysis using a multi-correspondence analysis report that the topic dendrogram correctly identified the underlying conceptual structure at hand, already discussed in Figure 17. In fact, the simple analysis of word occurrences in Figure 20, as well as Figure 21 and Figure 22, with word dynamics analysis and word clouds, corroborate the same results.
Figure 20. Word occurrences.
Figure 21. Word dynamics.
Figure 22. Word clouds.
Then, in the second step, the emerging trends of the themes and topics have been identified. In fact, Figure 23, Figure 24, Figure 25 and Figure 26 identify thematic evolutions over five time periods automatically selected by the software algorithms [32]. While in the very first time period, a few and mostly generic themes and topics were dealt with, such as geogrids, pavements and airports applications, then, there was a kind of increase in the interest of the scientific community towards road engineering and reinforcement that was maintained over the second and third steps (Figure 23). More recently, a variety of themes and topics have been developed, starting from 2019 on, that relate to cyclic loading, image correlation, retaining walls, fly ash, specific hemes related to some methodological aspects (e.g., finite elements, equivalent-linear analysis, field tests, falling weight deflectometer, base-layer coefficients, first-order reliability), fiber coating, geotextiles, equilibrium and stabilization, column, supported embankment, stiffness, etc. (Figure 23). The thematic map in Figure 24 shows how the snow-balling of the generic geosynthetic theme is the most relevant and central, while road engineering, geogrids and reinforcement are very relevant, too, but not so central in the ongoing literature discourse. The thematic map network in Figure 24 reports how a plethora of clusters grew up over the time all around the geosynthetics literature, thus, highlighting the existence of a variety of themes and topics related to: methodology developments, railway, economic aspects, polymer and geotextiles, sustainability, geogrids, erosion, bridges, 3D printing, soil reinforcement, pavements, stiffness, etc. In any case, the most relevant trends in the literature remain those related to overall geosynthetics research, roads, geogrids, and reinforced soils (Figure 26). Finally, the fastest increase in the themes and topics in terms of log (frequency) [32] is found to be related to geosynthetics, geogrids, road engineering, and reinforcement soil (Figure 26).
Figure 23. Thematic evolution over five periods.
Figure 24. Thematic map.
Figure 25. Tree map.
Figure 26. Trend topics.
Then, as the last step, the correct identification of the themes and topics has been further checked with two external expert researchers that have been involved in an elicitation study in order to consolidate the research results and confirm the methodological correctness of the research [42,43,44,45].

4. Conclusions

This research provides a descriptive scenario of the ongoing discourse in the scientific literature as well as the identification of trends and topics on Life Cycle Assessment-based (LCA-based) industrialization and commercialization of geosynthetics in the field of Industry 4.0, by applying a scientometric study. The key articles published in this field were analyzed through both a quantitative and a qualitative approach, and the main keywords, themes, and topics are identified and discussed. This way, we cover a gap in the literature related to providing a hitherto missing analysis of the fragmented and the unsystematized literature in the field. We also aim at contributing to the systematization of the research field by means of applying a standardized approach that is already consolidated in the existing literature [32].
In fact, we find that the literature at hand is highly fragmented and also characterized by ambiguity and lack of universally accepted understanding of some themes and topics, in particular those related to environmental and commercial aspects related to geosynthetics [1,6,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,16,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31].
Moreover, this work aims at identifying emerging or increasingly relevant topics and trends in geosynthetics-related research. In fact, Figure 21, Figure 22 and Figure 23 clearly show how the most relevant hot topics and research trends—excluding the “general purpose” keywords related to geogrids, geosynthetics et similia—are currently focusing on “road engineering”, “cyclic loading”, “reinforcement” or “reinforced soil”, “bridge abutments”, “base-layer coefficients”.
From the theoretical and conceptual point of view, the main limitations are due to the fact that existing themes and topics in the literature have been identified by means of a pre-extraction through an automated keyword extraction tool—i.e., a software algorithm [32]—that might neglect or overrate some keywords in comparison with others. Therefore, this preliminary step could lead to a potential bias, due to the fact that the pre-selection of papers analyzed in this study is only based on quantitative algorithms focusing on citations, and not on qualitative analyses in the initial step. Such a possible bias would create a lack of theoretical and conceptual perspectives included in the papers not selected initially.
A limitation highlighted by this study and also a practical implication is that, in parallel with this scientometric study, a complementary review effort should be conducted with an in-depth qualitative and manual approach, thus, not relying on preliminary automated software, with the aim of identifying additional key themes and topics that are equally relevant to the ongoing discourse in the literature.
Such an issue could eventually lead to a partly misleading identification of emerging trends that need to be further explored in the near future.
Clear proof of such a limitation is linked to the fact that some relevant contributions in the literature have been identified as [46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66,67,68,69,70,71,72,73,74,75,76]. However, such a limitation indicates also that future research efforts could be conducted with complimentary qualitative approaches.
Moreover, this research shows also the most relevant contributions and authors in the field based not only on total/cumulated citation, but also on the normalized results that consider the recency of some works/authors that have cumulated a relevant amount of citations in a shorter time, so that early career researchers and all other scholars could more easily identify their major colleagues to connect with in order to develop future research efforts.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, C.G.; methodology C.G. and G.S.V.; software G.S.V. and R.P.; validation G.S.V. and R.P.; formal analysis C.G., G.S.V. and R.P.; investigation C.G. and G.S.V.; resources G.S.V.; data curation R.P.; writing—original draft preparation C.G., G.S.V. and R.P.; writing—review and editing C.G., G.S.V. and R.P.; visualization G.S.V.; supervision C.G.; project administration, C.G.; funding acquisition C.G. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Funding

This research was funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research, Italian National Operational Programme on Research and Innovation Attraction and International Mobility, grant number AIM1805501-1, CUP C36C19000000005. The APC was funded by Italian Ministry of University and Research, Italian National Operational Programme on Research and Innovation Attraction and International Mobility, grant number AIM1805501-1, CUP C36C19000000005.

Institutional Review Board Statement

Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement

Not applicable.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript; or in the decision to publish the results.

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