Economic development and construction safety research: a bibliometrics approach

Abstract

The construction industry contributes significantly to economic development worldwide, yet it is one of the most hazardous industries where numerous accidents and fatalities happen every year. Little research to date has shed light on the impact of economic development on construction safety research. In this paper, we conduct an analysis of construction safety articles published in the 21st century via a bibliometrics approach. We have analysed: (1) construction safety in developed and developing countries; (2) the major organisations that have conducted construction safety research; (3) authors and territories of the research and (4) topics in construction safety and future research directions. The largest number of published construction safety documents were published by scholars from the US and China; the total number of published articles by these two countries was 1,125, at 56% of the 2000 articles that were published. Both countries showed high levels of research collaboration. While our results suggest that economic development may drive academic construction safety research, there has been an increase in construction safety research conducted by developing countries in recent years, probably due to an improvement in their economic development. While authors’ keywords evidenced the popularity of research on safety management and climate, the network analysis on all keywords, i.e. keywords given by Web of Science and authors, suggest that construction safety research focused on three areas: construction safety management, the relationship between people and construction safety, and the protection and health of workers’ impact on construction safety. We found that there is a new interdisciplinary research trend where construction safety combines with digital technologies, with the largest number involving deep learning. Other trends focus on machine learning, Building Information Modelling, machine learning and visualisation.