Visualized analysis of safety climate research: A bibliometric data mining approach

It is well known that safety climate (SC) has paramount significance in safety science and accident prevention. In this paper, a bibliometric data mining is conducted to systematically review the research domain of SC. Overall, 1624 documents on SC are obtained, covering 4830 authors, 473 journals, 89 countries/regions, and 1766 in-stitutions between 1980 and 2021. SC has obtained increasing attention since the number of publications related to SC grew from 1 in 1980 to 188 in 2020. Based on the bibliometric data, network analysis was carried out to understand the relationship among different countries/regions, authors, and keywords. Safety Science, Journal of Safety Research, and Accident Analysis and Prevention are the major sources of SC publications, and the USA, Australia, and China lead scientific collaboration production on SC research. Then, text mining of publication keywords is used to identify the hot topics and the evolution of mainstream research over time in the SC domain. The dominant topics in SC research include culture, performance, safety behavior, and model. Meanwhile, the limitations of past research on SC are analyzed and the differences between SC and safety culture are discussed. Moreover, recommendations for future research on SC are also given based on the results of bibliometric analysis and existing literature reviews.