The WELL Building Standard: A literature review and bibliometric analysis of a nascent field
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The WELL Building Standard is a voluntary rating system developed in 2014 that aims to support, maintain, and promote occupant health and well-being in buildings. While studies are increasingly covering WELL’s implementation in buildings, the literature currently lacks systematic review efforts to evaluate the WELL standard in the academic literature, understand its evolution and previous trends, and guide future research directions. The goal of this review paper is to shed more light on this nascent standard by studying the state and trends of the current literature, the extent of the effectiveness of the use of WELL in buildings, and how WELL compares to other rating systems. A three-step methodology was conducted, including (i) article search, screening, and selection; (ii) a bibliometric analysis to map the field’s evolution; and (iii) a detailed review of scientific articles. A keyword co-occurrence analysis indicates the emergence of a health and well-being theme and an energy theme, with little overlap of co-occurrence between the two. The detailed article review also indicates that WELL-certified buildings mostly show higher satisfaction with mental health, well-being, and productivity than non-WELL-certified buildings. However, limited to no improvements in physical health satisfaction were observed. Compared with other rating systems, WELL is generally more inclusive and comprehensive regarding advanced health, safety, and well-being indicators. Future research should investigate WELL’s long-term effectiveness and benefits, as well as mechanisms and policies to mitigate high certification costs. Interdisciplinary studies are also needed to expand WELL’s application across different building types, weather climates, and socio-economic contexts. • A review and bibliometric analysis of the WELL Building Standard is presented. • WELL buildings report high mental health, well-being, and productivity levels. • However, limited to no improvements in physical health satisfaction are observed. • Future studies should explore long-term effectiveness and certification costs. • New applications could target new building types, locations, and social contexts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.038 | 0.072 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".