Bibliometric review maps four decades of physical work environment research

A bibliometric review of 834 peer-reviewed journal articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science from 1978 through 2024 found that research on the physical work environment expanded substantially and broadened from office layout and facility management toward employee well-being, sustainability, hybrid work and pandemic-era workplace transformation. The review, published in SN Social Sciences , maps the field’s intellectual structure, collaboration networks, thematic development and emerging research directions. The authors define the physical work environment as the tangible elements surrounding employees while they perform job tasks.

These include ambient conditions such as lighting, temperature, air quality and noise; spatial features such as furniture, equipment and circulation; and symbolic artifacts including signage, décor and personal items. The review examines how these settings relate to productivity, satisfaction, health, engagement and other employee or organizational outcomes. The review followed a four-phase bibliometric procedure adapted from earlier work and aligned its collection and screening process with PRISMA guidelines.

Records were retrieved on 15 March 2025 from Scopus and Web of Science, using business and management subject-area filters and a Boolean query applied to titles, abstracts and author keywords. The search combined terms including “physical work environment,” “workplace design,” “office building,” “open plan” and “private office.” Researchers restricted the corpus to English-language, peer-reviewed journal articles and removed duplicate records. Peripheral standalone terms such as “ergonomics” and “office furniture” were excluded because they retrieved substantial biomechanical, medical or product-design research outside the review’s management and organizational focus.

After screening, the dataset contained 834 articles, more than 32,000 cited references and contributions from 1,906 authors across 214 publication sources. Of the articles, 153 were single-authored, while the remainder were co-authored, with an average of 2.66 authors per article. The team used descriptive statistics, co-authorship and co-citation networks, keyword co-occurrence analysis, multiple correspondence analysis and strategic thematic mapping.

VOSviewer was used to generate network maps, and the thematic map classified topics according to their centrality and density as motor, basic, niche, or emerging or declining themes. Annual publication output showed an overall growth rate of 9.57%. Contributions were sporadic from 1978 to 1998, increased modestly from 1999 to 2005, and rose steadily from 2006 to 2014.

The field consolidated from 2015 to 2020 before output fluctuated between 2021 and 2023. Publication volume then reached 67 articles in 2024, the highest annual total in the dataset. The authors associate this increase with post-pandemic discussion of workplace design, hybrid models and employee well-being, while emphasizing that recent annual output has not followed a continuously rising trajectory.

The leading publication outlets were the Journal of Corporate Real Estate , with 113 articles, Facilities , with 81, and the Journal of Facilities Management , with 60. Bradford’s Law placed these journals in a core zone, alongside outlets addressing sustainability, organizational learning, construction and engineering. By contrast, the co-authorship network of authors with at least four publications was sparse, with 17 nodes, 11 links and a density of 0.08.

Institutional collaboration was also sparse, with a density of 0.04, and the country network showed locally cohesive but globally segmented clusters. Keyword analysis identified clusters centered on spatial configuration and organizational behavior, infrastructure and sustainability, employee-centered outcomes, flexible and hybrid work, and workplace learning. The timeline showed early attention to office layout, learning and employee behavior, followed by greater focus on sustainability, facility management and productivity from 2014 to 2020.

Well-being and activity-based working gained attention after 2018, while COVID-19 and work at home became dominant themes mainly during 2022–2024. Multiple correspondence analysis organized the literature along two dimensions explaining 69.10% of the total variance: employee- and organization-oriented concerns contrasted with physical and asset-management dimensions, and established workplace-management concerns contrasted with emerging adaptive priorities involving flexibility and health. The thematic map placed office buildings, office layout, sustainability and facility management among the well-developed, central motor themes.

Indoor environment, indoor air quality, commercial real estate, workplace health and stress were classified as niche themes with limited links to other topics. Coworking spaces and workplace learning appeared in the emerging-or-declining quadrant, which the authors interpret cautiously as a possible mismatch between rapidly changing practice and the slower academic publication cycle. COVID-19 was positioned among basic themes: it was strongly connected to several central topics but had not become a cohesive, internally specialized domain.

The review identifies several bounded limitations. Its results depend on Scopus and Web of Science coverage and may omit relevant work in other databases, regional repositories and gray literature. The corpus was limited to English-language publications and to business and management subject areas, so it may not represent all disciplinary traditions or non-English research.

The collaboration network’s four-publication threshold also excludes less-prolific authors and may understate the broader collaboration structure. As a bibliometric synthesis, the study identifies patterns in publication activity and knowledge networks; it does not itself establish causal effects of particular workplace designs on employee outcomes.

Subject of Research: Bibliometric analysis of physical work environment research in management and business literature

Article Title: The physical work environment in management research: a bibliometric analysis of knowledge structures, collaboration networks, and workplace transformations

Article References: Rejeb, A., Rejeb, K., Süle, E., Changalima, I. A., & Treiblmaier, H. (2026). The physical work environment in management research: a bibliometric analysis of knowledge structures, collaboration networks, and workplace transformations. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 376. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01654-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01654-8

Keywords: physical work environment, bibliometric analysis, workplace design, facility management, employee well-being, sustainability, hybrid work, collaboration networks, thematic mapping, Scopus, Web of Science, physical