Please, suggest ways to study BIM standards and legislation in railways (or in the AEC industry in general), and the constraints that this implies. Examples and case studies will be a plus.
Refer to the Crossrail project in London. BIM was extensively used, not only in the design of stations but of all the railway infrastrutucture and systems.
I use a research method called content analysis to infer meaning in written technical documents. We use a software called Nvivo that conducts the searchs on PDF versions of the documents under study. Look for papers by Krippendorff 1980, Weber 1990, and Elo and Kyngäs 2008 for the details on how to conduct a content analysis. Best wishes for your research.