A holistic and systematic assessment of maintenance approaches in heritage sites

Abstract

Maintenance approaches of heritage sites (MAHs) on heritage sites have become essential in both the industry and academia as construction projects grow increasingly complex. With a prime goal of increasing its productivity and safety, MAHs research has witnessed tremendous growth over the past three decades. With the increase in research grows the necessity to monitor the research growth of a research topic to identify its trends and gaps, and hence shed the light on research areas that warrant future research attention, there is a lack of systematic literature analysis in MAHs field. To fill this gap, this paper recruited a mixed-review method of scientometric and systematic reviews of research papers on MAHs published from 1990 to 2020 (as of mid of July). Its ultimate objective is to identify current trends, technologies, and techniques in the field of heritage site maintenance and layout their advantages and disadvantages. Additionally, country contributions are highlighted to identify which countries produce the most effective research in the field. Finally, the most cited articles are identified to highlight important topics in the selected time period. As a result, Journal of Destination Marketing & Management has the highest ranking across the different journals in the area of MAHs based on its number of published articles and their citations. In addition, the publisher Elsevier has the highest number of published articles with 58. Results also demonstrated that the collaboration between Ecuador and Spain accomplished the highest ranking, such that the strength link was estimated to be equal to 3. Moreover, the highest repetitive keywords were indicators with 20 times and cultural heritage cities with 19 times.