The Ontological and Epistemological Nature of a Research Field: Geosynthetics in Road and Railway Infrastructure

Reviews of applied engineering literature typically treat citation and co-occurrence data as a neutral proxy for a field’s structure, without asking what kind of knowledge that data actually represents. As opposed to the overwhelming majority of simple descriptive reports characterizing the mushrooming bibliometric papers, this study introduces a binary philosophical framework- ontological and epistemological approaches- to read the geosynthetics-in-transportation literature. The ontological reading maps the field’s conceptual structure as a continuous knowledge landscape spanning soil-geosynthetic mechanics, pavement performance, drainage, soil stabilization, railway ballast, and reinforced unpaved roads. The phenomenological reading traces the field’s documented publication development by its research community, its growth trajectory, productivity hubs, and evolving thematic focus over the past decade. The epistemological reading reconstructs how knowledge in the field has actually been produced and validated, revealing a paradigmatic design core that branches into specialized, increasingly autonomous problem domains anchored to a shared testing infrastructure. Together, the three readings diverge in instructive ways, identifying questions concerning standardization and sustainability for further investigation. The study identifies key research tendencies within a search-defined corpus and demonstrates an approach to interpreting the organization of geosynthetics knowledge, rather than providing exhaustive coverage of road and railway applications. Beyond its contribution to geosynthetics research, the study proposes this triadic framework as a transferable lens for critically situating any applied engineering literature, a conceptual departure from conventional science-mapping reviews.

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