To realize project management improvement, many different objectives have to be considered simultaneously due to the nature of complexity and uncertainty in construction projects. Along with the rapid development of progressive technologies, solving the project management problem from the multi-objective optimization (MOO) perspective has drawn a lot of attention and become a necessary trend. To better promote the adoption of MOO for solving problems in the construction industry, the paper presents a systematic review under both scientometric and qualitative analysis to understand the current state and discusses the future research trends of MOO for project improvement. To begin with, a scientometric review is performed to explore the characteristics of keywords, journals, and clusters based on 411 journal articles published in 1991-2020. It is found that there has been an explosion of MOO-related papers, especially in the past 10 years. Then, a brief understanding of MOO is provided, which analyses the key problems in the adoption of MOO for project improvement management. Special concerns have been put on six hot research topics, where the MOO methods have been widely applied for achieving better project performance, including (1) project planning and constructability, (2) prefabrication and supply chain, (3) workplace safety and risk management, (4) construction automation and digitalization, (5) structural health monitoring, and (6) emergency response and evacuation management. Based on the systematic review, challenges of promoting wide adoption of MOO for better project improvement are identified, i.e., incompatibility with dynamic features, ambiguity of input-output relationship, and low interaction in the advance project management. To address these challenges, three potential directions, adaptive optimization, interpretable mapping and interactive optimization, are discussed. • A scientometric review for MOO is performed on 411 journal articles published in 1990–2020. • Three critical aspects for the suc...