A literature review on construction costs estimation: Hot topics and emerging trends

The aim of the present paper is to investigate the literature on the issues of construction costs in building production and urban development in order to identify the most relevant trends and describe the research context. In particular, a bibliometric analysis was carried out through one of the most acknowledged bibliometric databases, Scopus. Due to the great number of documents related to this topic, the literature review was conducted at three different levels: the first one investigates in a wider manner the cost value, the second one analyses the costs in building production and infrastructure, whereas the third one focuses on the evaluation approaches and new trends emerging from the literature. This study has allowed an advance in the comprehension of the main relevant issues related to this topic and an in-depth understanding of the role of evaluation methods as an instrument to synthesize the full range of aspects involved in the cost and in the project life-cycle. The increasing importance of topics like Building Information Modeling (BIM), Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) or Multicriteria analysis shows clearly a transition of the research to a sustainable view of the production operations and to a life cycle perspective of the projects.