Road Safety Intervention: Publication Trends and Future Research Directions

Abstract

Road safety is vital and essential to the community. It is, therefore, crucial to understand the evolving nature of this scientific domain. This study discusses the bibliometric review of scholarly research performed in road safety intervention. The study uses the Scopus database and various bibliometric parameters such as publication trends, citations and authors' keywords. Graphical visualisation of bibliometric indicators using VOSviewer and SciMAT were also presented. This study also scrutinised the content analysis of future research directions through a scoping review. Results show that the number of publications on road safety intervention have fluctuated, with the highest number of publications were 21 in 2019. The field of research on road safety intervention was diverse, with the top three on the list are medicine, social science and engineering. The authors' keywords of "road safety" is grouped in a similar cluster to "speeding", "injury prevention" and "road traffic injuries"; this information provided a substantial impact on road safety interventions in future research directions. The United Kingdom became the top leading country to publish more research on road safety interventions over 26 years. The scoping review depicted that human factors were shown to have a crucial role in improving road safety interventions. The essential motor theme during the first period (2001 - 2010) was "attitude". Other motor themes, such as "pedestrian", "traffic-accident", "human" and "road safety interventions", became the most significant number of publications in the second period (2011 - 2020). These five themes may be beneficial as a benchmark for researchers focusing on the art of road safety intervention. The bibliometric and scoping review in this study could provide an in-depth analysis of road safety interventions that attract the researchers' interest in this area.