Yongjian Ke

Outputs and impact: Attention, uptake and use

· 6 min

The profiles linked above hold the counts. This page is about what they mean, which is a different question. Three claims are usually run together when a research record is described: that other researchers have paid attention to the work, that the field treats it as part of its furniture, and that someone outside a university has used it. They rest on different evidence, and only the third is close to what impact normally means.

The shape of the record

More than 110 journal articles, six books, a set of book chapters, and many conference papers, published in Chinese and English since 2005. Google Scholar records 8,977 citations, an h-index of 42 and an i10-index of 89. About half of those citations, 4,429, have arrived since 2021, which is the more informative figure. It says the early work is still being used rather than superseded.

The books matter more than their citation counts suggest, because metrics handle them poorly. Two recent English-language volumes attempt consolidation rather than novelty: a critical handbook on public-private partnerships in international infrastructure development, edited with Stewart Clegg and colleagues in 2024, and a body of knowledge for PPP project management, edited with Robert Osei-Kyei in 2026. Three earlier Chinese-language books published by Tsinghua University Press, two of them with Wang Shouqing, introduced concession project financing and risk allocation to a readership that was then mostly practitioner rather than academic.

Where the citations concentrate

The count is not evenly spread. A small group of papers published between 2009 and 2011, nearly all on risk allocation and critical success factors in Chinese PPPs, carries a large share of it. Those papers keep appearing in the most-cited lists that journals publish about themselves: second most cited over a three-year window in Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, consistent top-ten status in the Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, top five across four separate audits in the Journal of Management in Engineering, and repeated placings between third and eighteenth in the International Journal of Project Management.

That concentration is worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over. Those papers were written early in a literature that then expanded quickly, and they offered ranked lists that later authors could cite as a starting point. Being useful as a point of departure is a real contribution. It is not the same as being influential in argument.

Recent work has visibility of a different kind, mostly through Project Management Journal: a narrative review of project management in industry 5.0 was the sixth most read and fourth trending article there in 2026, a review of literature reviews was seventh most read across 2025 and 2026, and a multi-level governance model for inter-organisational project networks sits in the journal's ten most cited papers of the past three years.

How the field describes the record

Bibliometric reviews of the PPP literature have become a genre in their own right, and I appear in most of them. Since 2016, at least fourteen such studies have ranked either my papers or me: five papers among the ten most cited in a 2021 review in Construction Management and Economics and again in a 2020 review in Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, seventh most influential author in a 2020 Scientometrics analysis, second most cited author in a 2019 review, and fourth most productive worldwide in a 2016 Scientometrics study.

I record this because it is evidence of standing in a field, and I discount it for the same reason it is easy to generate. These reviews count a common corpus with slightly different methods, so their rankings agree with each other by construction. Early entry into a growing literature is rewarded twice, once in the citation count and again in every review that ranks by citation count.

Where the work has been used outside the university

More than forty policy documents, guidelines and institutional reports cite the work, spanning 2011 to 2025. The concentration that matters is in reference documents rather than research papers. The comparative risk allocation study appears in the World Bank and PPP Knowledge Lab PPP Reference Guide in its 2013, 2014 and 2017 editions, and in the Asian Development Bank's PPP Monitor in 2017 and 2019. Those are documents that practitioners open when they are structuring a transaction.

Beyond that the spread is wide and largely unplanned. The World Health Organization's Commission on Social Connection cited the social infrastructure review in 2025. Tanzania's Public Procurement Regulatory Authority cited the road construction compliance work in 2024. The Inter-American Development Bank has used the fuzzy risk assessment model in work on Latin American megaprojects and on water and sanitation partnerships, and Brazil's Fundação Getulio Vargas used it in an analysis of highway concession terminations. The Czech Ministry of Transport, the Swedish Transport Administration, the German Federal Environment Agency and the European Union's Publications Office have all cited the sustainable transport review. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the United Nations Environment Programme, the Korea Institute of Public Finance and the Papua New Guinea National Research Institute have cited various PPP papers.

I sought almost none of this, and in nearly every case a single article is cited once in a long document. That is the honest scale of it. The work is findable at the point where someone is drafting guidance, and it is used as a supporting reference rather than as a source of argument.

Recognition

Stanford's world top 2 per cent scientist list, single-year in 2020 and 2023, and both single-year and career-long in 2024 and 2025. Within built environment and design, SciVal records a field-weighted citation impact of 1.86, with 81.3 per cent of publications in first-quartile journals and 31.5 per cent among the top 10 per cent most cited worldwide. Paper awards from CRIOCM in 2024, CIB in 2015 and UTS in 2020, and reviewing awards from the International Journal of Project Management, Utilities Policy and Built Environment Project and Asset Management.

What none of this measures

Citations record attention, not agreement. A ranked list of risks can be cited approvingly by an author who never tested it, and most of mine have been.

None of this evidence shows whether a single project was governed differently.

The record is also less individual than a single-author profile implies. Many of these papers are led by colleagues and former students, and my contribution varies from framing the study to reading a late draft. I have been on more than 110 papers, which is not the same as having written them.

Policy citation means a reference, not adoption. Appearing in the World Bank's reference guide shows the work was available and credible to whoever was drafting that section. It does not show that the guide follows the argument, and it does not show that anyone structuring a project has read it.

The bibliometric rankings are self-reinforcing. Reviews rank by citation count, practitioners and students find papers through reviews, and the papers already ranked accumulate further citations. A record can look increasingly settled while nothing new is being established.

The question underneath all of it is the one the evidence cannot reach. My research argues that risk should be allocated to the party able to manage it, that social content belongs in priced documents, and that consent has to be sustained rather than secured once. Whether any of that has changed how a project was actually structured is not something a citation count can answer, and I have no better instrument for it than anyone else does. The questions behind this record are set out on the research page.

The papers that carry most of this count