Science Structure And Topics Evolution Of Safety

Safety Science is a young scientific field of study, which has a history of nearly 30 years. The fundamental discussion of Safety Science are ongoing in its history. The structure and the topics evolution of safety science are one of the important topics in the current age. Because of the study of safety science has become more complex and diffused in other science studies, it has been more difficult to understand the structure and topics evolution of safety science. Meanwhile, it is important and meaningful to study the existing achievements. In this study, the safety science articles are collected from the Web of Science. The Cooccurrence and Visualization methods were applied to extract structure and topic evolution of the safety science.Firstly, the explanation of the knowledge unit Co-Occurrence theory and methods were discussed in the dissertaion. There are three levels of analyzing methods used in the thesis, including Macro level, Meso level and Micro level. The method of co-occurrence was used to analyze the macro structure of safety science. The Bibliographic Coupling and Co-citation Clustering methods for journalistic research were used to analyze the meso structure of safety science. The method of frequencies and co-occurrences for words were used to analyze the topics evolution and the micro structure of safety science. The sample data was collected from the international scientific indexed database—Web of Science TM(Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index), which was widely used in the scientometrics research. A total of 65,918 articles in safety and 7,853 articles in occupational safety were downloaded and saved as the local dataset.Secondly, the macro structure of safety science was analyzed in two ways, including Categories Overlay and Co-Occurrence analysis. The Overlay Cluster analysis shows that safety science research is mainly located in Clinical Medicine, Biomedical Science, Health and Social Issue, Psychological Science, etc. Sub-categories are Pharmacology Pharmacy, Surgery, Public Environmental Occupational Health, Medicine General Internal Oncology, etc. The categories overlay research also shows that the safety science research is obviously multi-disciplinary. The co-occurrence of the category has shown that the sub-domains of safety science are “Economic, Business, Management”, “Information science”, “Engineering”, “Biology Technology and chemistry”, “Psychology, Education” and “Social Science”. The network analysis has shown that the “Engineering Industrial” and “Operational Research & Management Science” have the most co-occurrence frequencies within the network.Thirdly, the Journals overlay, bibliographic coupling and co-citation were shown that the meso structure of safety science in global and local journals map. The diverse distribution of the safety journals in global map not only describes the multi-disciplinary feature of safety science, but also delineates that “medicine-medical-clinical”, “physics-materials-chemistry” and “psychology-education-health-economics” are the hot regions of safety research. Journals bibliographic coupling and co-citation illustrate that the structure of safety can be divided into two parts: Medical-Related Safety and Safety Technology & Engineering. These two parts have been connected by “Quality & Health”. The time series of the journals cluster shows that the structure of safety has not changed much, while the proportion of some areas has changed.Finally, the methods of Co-Words and Word Frequencies analysis were applied to draw the micro structure of safety science. The results not only revealed the evolution of a certain word, but also the evolution of the network in different time periods. Safety science is a broad topic and has difficulties gathering all the detailed results from the global research, hence the occupational safety topic was added, in the dissertation, as the supplementary analysis. The results of the occupational safety has disclosed that the topics structure can be divide into two parts, “occupational injury” and “occupational exposure”.Based on the structure and topics evolution of safety science, the Research and Development(R&D) were also discussed in the research.