CONSTRUCTION HEALTH AND SAFETY: A SCIENTOMETRIC ANALYSIS

Abstract

Health and safety culture has received a lot of attention across the construction industry. The effect of poor health and safety culture includes but not limited to decreased productivity, cost implication, among others. Although many studies have been conducted on construction health and safety culture, however, there exists a dearth of systematic studies using visualization. This study reviews published research in the Scopus database in construction health and safety in the South African construction industry from 1999 to 2020 using scientometric analysis. The study visualized the different clusters (for example keywords, citation). The research themes over the years was critically and objectively identified. The study classified the construction health and safety research in the South African construction industry into five eras. It was observed that the present research focus is discussing health and safety in light of technological advancement. Although an important research area, there exist not so much attention by researchers and it was also observed that there is a lack of collaboration among researchers in this research focus. This paper presents an in-depth description of construction health and safety in the South African construction industry.