Safety Science directions: The journal

Abstract

After briefly reviewing literature on safety science as a disciplinary domain, the paper analyses safety science topics from four years of the journal (2017–2020), revealing the numerous topics and domains represented. This analysis revealed a strong weighting towards transport (particularly road), with the list of other industry sectors headed by construction. Numerous risk types and intervention methods were identified in the sample of nearly 1400 papers, as well as diverse human and managerial strategies and multiple theoretical approaches to the study of safety. An authorship breakdown revealed that authors from 69 countries had contributed to Safety Science papers during this 4-year period. Many national ratings were strongly correlated with Safety Science authorship when standardized by country population size and a logarithmic transformation. A multivariate analysis found that two key authorship predictors were country mean income and degree of press freedom. Building on the journal's existing diverse topic range and international authorship distribution, particularly for collaborative ventures, possible ways forward for the journal included: increasing the number of journal offerings to represent different safety domains, fostering further international collaborations, mandating policy implications of published papers, and generating a preprint paper offering. Future directions for the journal could be explored within an iterative process involving Editorial Board members and other relevant parties.