With the development of civil engineering sustainability, the scope of corresponding research covers a broader range. It is difficult for researchers to master the holistic situation of the study, leading to duplication and lag of their research. Therefore, this paper aims to present a state-of-the-art of the research of civil engineering sustainability by adopting two new methods (bibliometric and social network analysis) to review the literature of this field. It is concluded that the existing research takes engineering as the main subject to improve its sustainability through technologies. Current research mainly focuses on technological innovations and evaluations of environmental impacts in the fields of construction technology, energy consumption, material preparation, and design. The countries with the largest number of published articles are the United States and China. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University is the institution that has published more articles than others. Journal of Cleaner Production and Sustainability are the journals that have published the most articles. For the researchers, a professor of the University of Adelaide is the researcher who has published the most articles, and experts from South China University of Technology, Chongqing University, and University of Brighton are the main hubs among different researchers.

Energy consumption and pollutant emissions from buildings have caused serious impacts on the environment. Currently, research on building environmental costs is quite insufficient. Based on life cycle inventory of building materials, fossil fuel and electricity power, a calculating model for environmental costs during different stages is presented. A single-objective optimization model is generated by converting environmental impact into environmental cost, with the same unit with direct cost. Two residential buildings, one located in Beijing and another in Xiamen, China, are taken as the case studies and analyzed to test the proposed model. Moreover, data uncertainty and sensitivity analysis of key parameters, including the discount rate and the unit virtual abatement costs of pollutants, are also conducted. The analysis results show that the environmental cost accounts for about 16% of direct cost. The environmental degradation cost accounts for about 70% of the total environmental cost. According to the probabilistic uncertainty analysis results, the coefficient of variation of material production stage is the largest. The sensitivity analysis results indicate that the unit virtual abatement cost of CO₂ has the largest influence on the final environmental cost.