In-depth analysis on safety and security research based on system dynamics: A bibliometric mapping approach-based study

Abstract

Safety and security (SS) research based on system dynamics (SD) play a greater theoretical and technical support for hazard identification and accident prevention, which meant SD has become an important method to study the system safety, also that SS research based on SD has entered the application stage. It is a relatively macroscopic understanding of the application of SD to SS research by scholars, and difficult to capture the changes and characteristics of specific topics from the understanding. To get an in-depth understanding of the current research characteristics and development in the research domain, and help researchers dig into the more information from a quantitative perspective, we retrieved 1091 documents about SS-related research based on SD published in the period 2000–2020 from the Web of Science Core Collection database in this paper, the bibliometric analysis and science mapping were carried out. The USA, China, UK, Germany and Australia were the five most contributions to the literature associated with SS research based on SD. In terms of the major sources and co-citation of SS-related research publications, IEEE Transactions on Power System, Safety Science, Energy Policy, System Dynamics Review and Reliability Engineering & System Safety are the five most active journals in this domain. The knowledge base of SS research based on SD focuses on “safety management”, “risk analysis” and “network and information security”. There are some significant differences between the safety and security domains while they are very similar in “risk analysis”. Currently, hotspot topics include “safety management”, “energy security”, “resource utilization” and “industry applications”. “system safety and reliability”, “energy consumption and security” and “power system dynamics and stability” have become the research frontier in the field.