Advancing Sustainability in the Built Environment: A Bibliometric Review of Building Envelope Retrofitting on Energy Efficiency and Climate Adaptation

Energy-efficient retrofitting of building envelopes is a cost-effective and scalable strategy for reducing energy consumption, lowering carbon emissions, and enhancing thermal comfort. This approach has gained increasing attention in recent years, driving significant growth in research publications. However, the rapid field expansion makes it challenging to discern the research landscape's direction, scope, and gaps. This paper provides a bibliometric review of the building envelope retrofitting research domain that focuses on energy efficiency and climate resilience, utilizing citation data from the Scopus database. 1214 relevant research articles were analyzed using the Biblioshiny application in the R-Studio package. Bibliometric analysis provides a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis and contributes to a deeper understanding of the research domain. The study maps publication trends, tracks trajectories, and identifies active collaboration networks among researchers. The review examines the evolution and distribution of frequently cited keywords, offering a detailed overview of emerging topics and dominant research themes. It highlights key sub-areas such as energy efficiency, energy conservation, materials and methods, energy simulations, life cycle analysis, performance assessments, and optimization. The study identifies research gaps and presents future opportunities to advance energy-efficient building envelope retrofitting for energy efficiency and climate resilience. This paper can guide future research and policy making and promote sustainable retrofit practices. The paper provides recommendations for future research and emphasizes the importance of continued innovation and international collaboration in an effort toward energy-efficient and climate-resilient buildings.