Over the past two decades, significant literature has been dedicated to research studies on construction partnering and related issues, and a plethora of underlying theories and industrial practices on partnering application have been reported. This paper aims to explore, analyze, and summarize the research trend of partnering related studies in construction using desktop search method from several leading construction-related journals. On the basis of an extensive and rigorous literature review, a series of partnering related journal articles published from 1989 to 2009 were analyzed in terms of the annual number of partnering related publications, the level of contributions made by various institutions and regions, and the research focus on their studies. A critical analysis of the reported literature revealed that, in general, the number of partnering related publications in these journals has been increasing from 1989 to just before 2007 when the number of publications the peaked. The findings might imply that partnering is becoming more and more important to the construction industry at large. This study also indicated that researchers from the United States published the largest number of partnering related papers on a regional basis, followed by those from the United Kingdom, Hong Kong (China), Sweden, Australia, Mainland China, and Korea. Research topics published in these journals tend to focus on partnering conceptual models, reviews of partnering development and application, potential benefits of and barriers to implementation, critical success factors, and partnering performance measurement and evaluation together with use of partnering across the construction supply chain, while the quantitative research techniques applied to this field of study involve primarily regression analysis, analytic hierarchy process (AHP), analytic network process (ANP), fuzzy set theory, and balanced scorecard method.
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