Abstract
The construction industry is recognized as a high-risk industry given that safety accidents and personnel injuries frequently occur. This study provided a systematic and quantitative review of existing research achievements by conducting social network approach to identify current states and future trends for the occupational safety of construction personnel. A total of 250 peer-reviewed articles were collected to examine the research on safety issues of workers in construction industry. Social network approach was applied to analyze the interrelationship among authors, keywords, and citations of these articles using VOS viewer and CitNetExplorer. A knowledge structure map was drawn using main path analysis (MPA) towards the collected papers, which was implemented by Pajek. In line with the findings of social network analysis, five research groups, and six keyword themes were identified in accordance with the times of cooperation of researchers and correlation among keywords of the papers. Core papers were identified by using main path analysis for each research domain to represent the key process and backbone for the corresponding area. Based on the finding of the research, significant implications and insights in terms of current research status and further research trends were provided for the scholars, thus helping generate a targeted development plan for occupational safety in construction industry.
Highlights
The construction industry is plagued by a high level of occupational risks and has been recognized as a hazardous industry in which fatal and nonfatal occupational injuries frequently occur [1,2,3,4]
Compared with the traditional literature review that mainly based on self-judgment and subjective determination, the quantitative literature review has superior objectivity and preciseness for identifying current research status and prospecting further research orientation because the results are derived from data and verified by statistical and computerized approaches [13,14]
Combining with the identified research domains and the core processes of knowledge development revealed in main path analysis, several trends and directions for further construction safety research were proposed: (1) Further studies are recommended to integrate the theories of multiple research domains, thereby expanding the orientations and scopes of the studies
Summary
The construction industry is plagued by a high level of occupational risks and has been recognized as a hazardous industry in which fatal and nonfatal occupational injuries frequently occur [1,2,3,4]. Given the serious problems of personnel safety in construction industry, the studies on the safety issue of construction workers were essential as a vital component of high production efficiency and operational profit of the construction industry [6,7,8]. Those academic achievements were reviewed time to time by scholars in qualitative way (traditional literature review) for examining the safety development of construction personnel [9,10,11,12]. The lack of quantitative review on construction safety research causes the research gap that hinders
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