A bibliometric review of process safety and risk analysis

Process safety and risk analysis have paramount significance in the modern process industries for preventing fatalities and asset and reputation loss due to an accident. Hence, this has been an active area of research for many decades around the world. In this paper, a bibliometric analysis-based review is presented to investigate the evolution of process safety and risk research. Specifically, the following basic questions are addressed: (i) Which countries are active in the research? (ii) What are the key areas? (iii) Who are the leading contributing authors? (iv) What are the potential sources of the publications? (v) What is the focus of most of the documents? (vi) What are the dominant factors behind the citations? and (vii) What is the contribution of the industries? Additionally, the evolution and popularity of major tools used in this field are also analyzed. It is found that safety and risk analysis is a global topic. China, Malaysia, and Iran are the emerging countries with an impressive percentage increase in research volume in this decade (2009-2018). The USA is the leading contributor, and India is the most cost-effective country. Methodology development-related works cover the vast portion of this field, and journals focusing on these works are highly likely to be cited by peer researchers. Despite a healthy contribution from industry, unfortunately collaborative works between industry and academia are rare. It is also observed that the field of process safety and risk analysis is of great growth potential with an exponential increase in the number of annual publications. (C) 2019 Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.