Scientometric and Bibliographic Analysis of Pedestrian Safety Research

Abstract

The vulnerability of pedestrians means that pedestrian and vehicle crashes often have severe consequences. Pedestrian safety related research has attracted researchers’ attention since the 1970s and has become increasingly popular in recent years. There were about 250 papers published in 2021 alone on this research domain. However, scientometric studies on a specific safety area are rarely conducted. Scientometric and bibliographic analyses provide researchers with a thorough understanding of research topics and historical knowledge on authorship, publishers, keywords (thematic topics), and collaborations that occurred in the research community on the specific research domain. This study bridges this gap by collecting 2,689 pedestrian safety-related papers from the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection database and conducting a scientometric and bibliographic analysis. The results show the increasing popularity of pedestrian safety-related studies, and the number of papers has increased significantly each year since 2000. This study also investigated the changes in the research interests in pedestrian safety-related studies temporally. The results show research interests changed from investigating the built environment, theoretical modeling, behavioral studies, and advanced modeling techniques over time. Moreover, the findings suggest that child pedestrian safety interests started to gain popularity in 2008, soon after the Safe Routes to School (SRTS) program was initiated in 2005, which shows the positive interactions between this research domain and policy-making progress.