For academic stewards

Uphold rigour and shape the discipline's discourse

For editors, referees, external examiners, and conference organisers, your role is to ensure the integrity, relevance, and advancement of Construction Management (CM) scholarship. The ARCOM CM Abstracts serves as your authoritative, curated benchmark; a shared reference point for evaluating contribution, assessing rigour, and mapping the field’s trajectory.

The stewardship challenge: Navigating a complex literature

Your judgments require a comprehensive, discipline-specific context. The challenge lies in efficiently verifying a work’s positioning against the full spectrum of relevant literature, beyond personal expertise or generic searches. This database provides the common corpus needed to make consistent, defensible, and insightful evaluations.

Key uses for editorial and evaluation work

• For journal editors and referees:
  • Assess contribution and novelty: Quickly contextualize a submission. Does it engage with an appropriate scholarly conversation? Does it offer a genuine new perspective, or replicate existing work? The curated corpus allows for efficient verification of an author's literature review and claims.
  • Identify overlooked seminal work: Check for key references that may be absent, strengthening the review process and ensuring submissions are properly grounded.
  • Benchmark methodological approaches: Use the PCTEA facets to see how a submission’s methods align with (or diverge from) established approaches for similar research questions.
• For doctoral examiners:
  • Evaluate literature review comprehensiveness: Efficiently assess the scope and appropriateness of a foundational chapter in a thesis. Does it demonstrate a systematic understanding of the field’s discourse on the topic?
  • Verify claims of originality: Interrogate the candidate’s stated contribution by examining the specific scholarly territory they claim to advance.
• For conference organisers and scientific committees:
  • Map trends for thematic tracks: Identify which research areas are highly active, emerging, or ripe for renewed attention. Use this analysis to structure compelling calls for papers and balanced conference programmes.
  • Ensure diversity of perspective: Analyse the theoretical and methodological approaches within a topic area to encourage a multi-faceted discussion rather than a narrow echo chamber.

The PCTEA facets: A lens for consistent evaluation

The PCTEA framework provides a structured vocabulary for evaluation discussions. It moves feedback beyond subjective impression to more objective description (e.g., “This manuscript clearly defines its Phenomenon and Concept but lacks a clear Analytical technique”). This can clarify feedback for authors and align editorial committee judgments.

A Tool for Collective Stewardship

The ARCOM CM Abstracts does not replace expert judgment but empowers it with a shared view of the field. It supports the critical work of maintaining scholarly quality, guiding early-career researchers, and consciously shaping the future direction of CM research through informed curation.