The Development and Progress of Engineering Economics: A Retrospect and Prospect Based on Visual Analysis

Engineering economics is a cross subject with a wide range of applications, and it has taken on different characteristics with the changing times. The aim of this paper is to depict a sufficiently elaborate and vivid knowledge map of this field, with further discussion and outlook on the hotspots presented therein. Based on the principles and methods of bibliometrics, we use several visualization tools, mainly Vosviewer, to present the characteristics of the published literature within the field of engineering economics from multiple perspectives. Specifically, we collect 624 engineering economics documents published in the Web of Science core collection database between 1915 and 2021, and quantitatively analyze them in the following three aspects: (1) basic data characteristics, including annual publications, annual citations, research directions, and highly cited publications; (2) outstanding performers and cooperations in the four levels of country/region, institution, source and author, including co-authorship, bibliographic coupling, co-citation and co-occurrence analyses; and (3) keyword analyses, including co-occurrence analyses, burst detection analyses, and high-frequency word clouds. In addition, we further explore important topics within the field represented by intelligent and green transformation.