Scientometric Analysis of Scientific Outputs of Project Management in Scopus Database

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the scientific outputs of the project management literature and draw a scientific map. The target population of this research is all documents indexed in Scopus database which have used the keywords of project management in their title, abstract or keywords. In this regard, 107438 documents were extracted and their process of citation was examined using BibExcel and VOSViewer software. The results showed that the project management research process has been growing exponentially, especially in the last two decades; so that 86% of scientific productions belong to this period and English language with 86% was the dominant language of published scientific documents. Also in the development of this branch of science, the international journal of project management was the most prominent publication with the most documents (2154) and the most citations (105959), and the United States was the most prominent country with 29,271 documents and 360,708 citations. In addition, the analysis in the evaluation of the role of institutions and researchers in the development of project management knowledge, showed that the American institute of electrical and electronics engineers with 133 documents and the department of building and real estate of Hong Kong polytechnic university with 3787 citations, respectively, were in the first place of the most active and influential institutions; And researchers Scott and Keil, with 100 documents and 5,625 citations, respectively, were among the top active and influential researchers. Finally, keyword analysis showed that the word project management with the repetition in 10581 documents and the word ethnography with 67.2 of the average citations, obtained the most repetitions and citations; At the same time, the emergence of up-to-date keywords such as digital transformation, the industry 4.0 and gamification, indicated that recent research has shifted towards the management of technological and innovative projects.