Mapping pedestrian safety studies between 2010 and 2021: A scientometric analysis

Abstract

Pedestrian deaths constitute 23% of road traffic deaths globally. Although several research papers have contributed to pedestrian safety analysis, they did not provide a comprehensive overview of the progress in the research domain and publication trends. This makes it difficult to identify trends and insights into the pedestrian research domain in light of the voluminous number of papers. This study fills this gap with a scientometric analysis of research on pedestrian safety analysis indexed in the Web of Science. The scope covers 2594 papers published between 2010 and 2021 in English. This study analyzed the annual publications and citation trends, top ten most cited papers, influential papers in their first three years after publication, contributing authors, funding agencies, and contributing journals. The regional gaps between the proportion of pedestrian deaths and research were also analyzed. The results showed low research productivity from low and middle-income countries although they have a high incidence of pedestrian deaths. Subsequently, the main keyword clusters or frontier topics were identified and topic analysis was employed to identify the evolution of studies. Four keyword clusters were identified, i.e., "vehicle-to-pedestrian crash and injury severity analysis", "pedestrian movement and decision simulation experiments", "improving the vehicle system towards reducing body region impact injuries", "pedestrian behavior in crosswalks and signalized intersections". This study contributes an integrated knowledge map of pedestrian safety analysis, publication trends, the evolution of studies, and under-researched topics to guide future research work in pedestrian safety analysis.

Keywords: Knowledge map; Pedestrian safety analysis; Scientometric analysis; Topic analysis.