Research outputs in ergonomics and human factors engineering: a bibliometric and co-word analysis of content and contributions

Abstract

This article analyzes research outputs in ergonomics and human factors engineering (EHFE), revealing its intellectual structure via bibliometric techniques, co-word analysis, network analysis and science visualization tools. The population comprises 23,472 records published during 2000–2018 in 19 core journals of the human factors and ergonomics subject category in Scopus. Findings showed that in EHFE fields ‘the United States’, ‘University of Central Florida’ and ‘Stanton NA’ were the most productive country, university and author, respectively. It was also found that ‘ergonomics’ was the most frequent keyword and ‘ergonomics × human factor’ the most frequent co-occurring keywords in EHFE documents. Hierarchical cluster analysis led to creation of eight topical clusters, including among others ‘biomechanics ergonomics’, ‘work-related musculoskeletal disorders & work system design’ and ‘performance’. The results indicated that ‘biomechanics ergonomics’ was a well-matured cluster while ‘human machine interaction’, ‘ergonomics design’, ‘macro-ergonomics’ and ‘cognitive ergonomics’ were found to be emerging or declining clusters.