State of science reviews

Now in its 56th year of publication, Ergonomics is a well-established and respected scientific journal. This is both in the immediate area of ergonomics and in human factors but also in broader disciplinary areas such as biomechanics, physiology, psychology, business and management, and engineering.

Much of the work of a scientific journal is reactive, evaluating those articles which authors choose to submit. Being proactive, Ergonomics, like many journals, does encourage themed special issues, where the process of soliciting and selecting contributions is directed. For example, in recent years Ergonomics has published special issues on:

• Ergonomics in schools (Legg, 2007)

• Driver safety (Stanton, 2007)

• The future of ergonomics (Stanton and Stammers, 2008)

• Slips, trips and falls (Chang, 2008)

• Sport, leisure and ergonomics (Atkinson and Reilly, 2009)

• Human factors and aviation (Harris and Stanton, 2010)

• Gender, women's work and ergonomics (Habib and Messing, 2012)

• Brain–computer interface and ergonomics (Nam, 2012)

• Ergonomics and sustainability (Haslam and Waterson, 2013)

Special issues currently in preparation include compilations on ‘Sociotechnical systems and safety’ and ‘Beyond human-centred automation – Concepts for human-machine interaction in multi-layered networks’. These are both due to be published in coming months.

It is apparent that the journal's special issues cover a good range of topics, and experience is that they are of high quality, well received by our readership and influential with subsequent research. Although Ergonomics is constrained to publishing only one or two special issues a year, we have decided that a series of invited state-of-science reviews will be a good complement to these, providing an interesting and worthwhile addition to the journal's pages. The intention with the state of science reviews is twofold, first to reflect on our knowledge on a substantive topic in ergonomics of contemporary interest. Second, the initial papers in the series will each be led by one of the journal's editors, with each editor having discretion to invite respected co-authors whose commentary the journal's readership should be interested to read. With much of the journal's editorial work happening quietly behind the scenes, this gives each of the editors an opportunity to step into the spotlight and showcase an area of ergonomics of their choosing.

A number of state-of-science reviews are underway, at various stages of development. In terms of their topic areas, these will be drawn from each editor's area of interest and expertise, summarised as follows:

Stephen Bao: physical exposure assessment, workplace ergonomics risk evaluation, work-related musculoskeletal intervention research, musculoskeletal disorder epidemiological studies, hand tool ergonomics, incorporation of ergonomics in engineering designs.

Wen-Ruey Chang: tribology; human biomechanics; injury epidemiology; psychophysics of slips, trips and falls; and whole body vibration.

Roger Haslam: human factors aspects of health and safety; falls as a multi-faceted problem; health and safety in construction; design, safety and usability of the built environment; relationship between work and healthy and productive ageing; and human factors in complex systems.

Sue Hignett: healthcare ergonomics and human factors in patient safety, safer moving and handling, design to reduce falls in care facilities for older people (including people with dementia), ergonomics in emergency and pre-hospital care; and hospital building design for staff and patients.

Thurmon Lockhart: human biomechanics, human locomotion and movement variability, fall prevention, wearable health monitoring system, and visual ability and performance.

Neil Mansfield: human factors for vehicle occupants; driver comfort, health and performance; seating ergonomics; industrial vehicle cab design; and human response to vibration.

Richard So: human responses to visual motion; visually induced motion sickness; spatial perceptions of binaural sound; functional brain studies of visual, auditory and vestibular cortices in human; and computational models of visual motion and auditory perception in human.

Neville Stanton: distributed cognition in simple and complex systems, cognitive task analysis, systems safety and resilience, automation and dynamic allocation of system function, systems ergonomics and work design, mental models and schema theory, predicting human and system performance, validation of methods.

Mark Young: cognitive ergonomics including aspects of attention and workload; transportation human factors in road, rail and air; human-automation interaction; and human-centred design; public engagement with science; human error and accident causation.

We hope readers will look out for the state-of-science review papers led by each of our editors and that these will be informative for a wide audience.

It is a pleasure then to introduce the first in the series of the Ergonomics state of science reviews, published in this issue, authored by Sue Hignett and her invited colleagues, on the topic of human factors and ergonomics in healthcare.