The structure and emerging trends of construction safety management research: a bibliometric review

Abstract

Recently, construction safety management (CSM) practices and systems have become important topics for stakeholders to take care of human resources. However, few studies have attempted to map the global research on CSM. A comprehensive bibliometric review was conducted in this study based on multiple methods. In total, 1172 CSM-related papers from the Web of Science Core Collection database were examined. The analyses focused on publication year, country–institute, publication source, author and research topics. The results indicated that the USA, China, Australia and the UK took leading positions in CSM research. Two branches of journals were identified, namely the branch of engineering science and that of safety science and social science. Additionally, seven themes together with 28 specific topics were detected to allow researchers to track the main structure and temporal evolution of CSM research. Finally, the main research trends and potential research directions were discussed to guide the future research.

Keywords:

• construction safety management
• bibliometric review
• CiteSpace
• emerging trends

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for support by the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China [Grant No. 2016YFC0701606].