International Research Progress on Traffic Accident Based on

Bibliometric Analysis Method

Jie Zhang, Yu Zhang, Hao Wang and Yuanyuan Yu

Research Institute of Highway, Ministry of Transport, Beijing, 100088, China

Keywords:

Traffic Accident Analysis, Bibliometric Analysis Method, Visualization, VOS Viewer, Severity.

Abstract: It is important to research on the characteristics, distribution rules, and mechanisms of traffic accidents,

which are carried out to explore the deep-seated causes of accidents. Based on bibliometric analysis method,

this paper conducts a quantitative analysis of 8125 papers in the field of traffic accident research from the

past five years. It is concluded that the most important document source in the current traffic accident field

is Accident analysis and prevention, the most important research countries are the United States and China,

and the most important research institutions are Tsinghua University and Tongji University. The main

research hotspots are traffic accident severity analysis, statistical analysis of traffic accidents, short-term

prediction of traffic accidents, prediction of traffic accident severity, and analysis of the impact of dynamic

factors such as weather on accidents. It has certain reference significance for domestic scholars to intuitively

understand the topics that have not been fully researched in our country and the gap between existing

research and foreign frontier fields through comparison.

1 INTRODUCTION

According to “The Global Status Report on Road

Safety 2018” issued by the World Health

Organization (World Health Organization, 2018),

road traffic crashes now represent the eighth leading

cause of death globally and road traffic injury is

now the leading cause of death for children and

young adults aged 5–29 years. Deaths from road

traffic crashes have increased to 1.35 million a year.

That’s nearly 3 700 people dying on the world’s

roads every day. Tens of millions of people are

injured or disabled by traffic accidents every year.

The property losses, medical expenses and

emergency expenses caused by traffic accidents are

huge, and they also bring huge trauma to the family

and society.

The occurrence of traffic accidents is the result

of a combination of factors such as people, vehicles,

roads, environment, and management. Through

research on the characteristics, distribution rules,

and mechanisms of traffic accidents, the deep-seated

causes of accidents are explored in order to provide

technical support for the prevention of traffic

accidents. In recent years, domestic and foreign

scholars have carried out a series of studies on

traffic accidents and achieved a series of results.

Domestic and foreign scholars analyse the impact of

human factors on traffic accidents from the

perspective of dangerous driving behaviours such as

distracted driving, aggressive driving, fatigue

driving, and drunk driving (Zhang, 2020; Klauer,

2014; Abegaz, 2014; Almahasneh, 2014), analyse

the impact of vehicle factors on traffic accidents

from the perspective of vehicle safety technical

performance such as active and safety of vehicles,

protection of vulnerable road users and vehicle

occupants, body collision compatibility (Kahane,

2015; Li, 2016; Badea-Romero, 2013), analyse the

impact of road factors on traffic accidents from the

perspective of road alignment, road safety facilities

and lighting facilities (Wong, 2007; Ma, 2010;

Yang, 2017).

At present, there are more and more researches

on road traffic accidents, but most of them focus on

certain aspects of road traffic accidents such as

dangerous driving behaviour, vehicle compatibility

design, road alignment optimization, etc. Existing

research results lack analysis from macro

perspectives such as road traffic accident research

trends, cutting-edge technologies, and research

hotspots. Based on the document co-occurrence

network analysis and visualization tool VOS viewer

Zhang, J., Zhang, Y., Wang, H. and Yu, Y.

International Research Progress on Trafﬁc Accident based on Bibliometric Analysis Method.

DOI: 10.5220/0011701400003607

In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Public Management, Digital Economy and Internet Technology (ICPDI 2022), pages 5-10

ISBN: 978-989-758-620-0

 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

software, this paper conducts a quantitative analysis

of 8125 papers in the field of traffic accident

research from 2016 to 2020. Through the source of

the document, the main research country, the main

research institution, the author of the paper,

quantitative analysis of key words and cited papers

in the paper, the most important sources of literature

in the current traffic accident field, the most

important research countries, research institutions

and scholars, as well as the research trends, research

frontiers and research hotspots in the field of traffic

accidents are summarized.

2 BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS

METHOD

Bibliometrics refers to the cross-science of using

mathematical and statistical methods to

quantitatively analyse all knowledge carriers. It is a

comprehensive knowledge system integrating

mathematics, statistics, and philology, focusing on

quantification. The measurement objects are mainly:

the amount of documents (various publications,

especially journal articles and citations), the number

of authors (individuals, collectives or groups), the

number of words (various document identifications,

most of which are thesaurus), document

measurement. The most essential feature of learning

is that its output must be "quantity".

2.1 Data Sources

The data source of this study is the core database in

Web of Science (WOS). In the database, through

entering "traffic accident" in the keyword part and

"2016-2020" in the age part, a total of 8125 related

documents are retrieved. The retrieval information is

stored in 17 files in a group of 500 pieces, and the

file format is ".txt" file.

2.2 Analysis Tools and Methods

VOS viewer (VOS viewer Manual, 2020) is a

software tool used to create maps based on network

data and to visualize and browse these maps. The

functions of VOS viewer can be summarized as

follows.

Create a map based on network data. You can

create a map based on an already available network,

or you can build the network first. VOS viewer can

be used to build a network of scientific publications,

scientific journals, researchers, research

organizations, countries, keywords or terms. Items

in these networks can be connected by co-authors,

simultaneous occurrences, citations, bibliographic

coupling or citation links.

Visualize and explore the map. VOS viewer

provides three kinds of map visualization: network

visualization, coverage visualization and density

visualization. The zoom and scroll functions allow

you to browse the map in detail, which is essential

for handling large maps containing thousands of

items. The "Create Map" wizard in VOS viewer can

be used to create a new map. There are multiple

ways to create a new map.

3 ANALYSIS AND

VISUALIZATION OF

CO-OCCURRENCE NETWORK

OF TRAFFIC ACCIDENT

LITERATURE

3.1 Literature Sources

According to the number of documents from each

source not less than ten papers, the top ten document

sources selected are shown in the following table.

According to the search results listed in Table 1,

the top ten document sources with the highest total

link strength have a total of 975 articles, accounting

for 12% of the total number of documents retrieved.

Among them, Accident analysis and prevention is

the journal that publishes the largest number of

papers in the field of traffic accidents. There are 333

articles in total, accounting for 4.10% of the total

number of retrieved documents. The number of

citations and total link strength of articles are much

higher than other journals. The second to tenth

places are Transportation research part-f-traffic

psychology and behaviour, Traffic injury

prevention, International journal of environmental

research and public health, Analytic methods in

accident research, Sustainability, Safety science,

Journal of safety research, Plos one, Journal of

advanced transportation.

ICPDI 2022 - International Conference on Public Management, Digital Economy and Internet Technology

Table 1: Literature sources.

Serial

number

Source

Number of

articles

Cited

times

Total connection

strength

1 Accident analysis and prevention 333 2723 683

2 Transportation research part-F: traffic psychology and behavior 139 661 201

3 Traffic injury prevention 144 550 176

4 International

ournal of environmental research and

ublic health 57 292 141

5 Analytic methods in accident research 18 675 136

6 Sustainability 56 85 120

7 Safety science 66 509 116

8 Journal of safety research 40 246 105

9 Plos one 74 319 103

10 Journal of advanced transportation 48 129 91

3.2 Research Countries

According to the number of published papers in

each country not less than five papers, and the

number of citations not less than five papers, the

information of the top ten countries selected is

shown in the figure below.

According to the search results listed in Figure 1,

the top ten countries with the highest total link

strength have a total of 4376 articles, accounting for

53.86% of the total number of documents retrieved.

Among them, China is the country with the largest

number of published papers, with a total of 1514

articles, accounting for 18.63% of the total number

of retrieved documents, and the United States has a

total of 971 papers, accounting for 11.95% of the

total number of retrieved documents, but the number

of citations and total links of Chinese articles both

are lower than the United States, which is about

90% and 80% of the United States respectively. The

above data indicates that the quality of Chinese

articles needs to be further improved. The third to

tenth places are the United Kingdom, Australia,

Germany, Sweden, Canada, Italy, Spain, and the

Netherlands. These countries are all economically

developed countries that have higher requirements

for traffic safety and more funding.

3.3 Research Organizations

According to the fact that each organization has

published no less than nine papers, and the number

of citations no less than four papers, the selected top

ten organization information is shown in the

following table.

Table 2: Research organizations.

Serial number Or

anization Number of articles Cited times Total connection stren

1 tsinghua univ 74 414 76

2 tongji univ 84 546 63

3 shahid beheshti univ med sci 53 108 57

4 univ tehran med sci 37 124 51

5 cent s univ 34 385 47

6 southeast univ 67 256 40

7 wuhan univ technol 74 148 39

8 beijing jiaotong univ 60 156 34

9 univ hong kong 21 221 33

10 changan univ 70 199 31

International Research Progress on Trafﬁc Accident based on Bibliometric Analysis Method

According to the search results listed in Table 2,

the top ten research institutions with the highest

total link strength have a total of 574 articles,

accounting for 7.06% of the total number of

documents retrieved. Among them, Tongji

University is the university with the largest number

of published papers, with a total of 84 articles,

accounting for 1.03% of the total number of

retrieved documents, and Tsinghua University has

74 papers, accounting for 0.91% of the total number

of retrieved documents, but the total link strength of

Tsinghua University’s papers is higher than Tongji

University. The third to tenth places are Shahid

Behshidi Medical University, Tehran Medical

University, Central South University, Southeast

University, Wuhan University of Technology,

Beijing Jiaotong University, Hong Kong University

and Chang' an University.

3.4 Research Authors

According to each author's publication of no less

than five papers and no less than three citations, the

information of the top ten authors is selected, and

the co-author network among prolific authors is

shown below.

According to the search results listed in Figure 2,

the top ten authors with the highest total link

strength have a total of 114 articles, accounting for

1.40% of the total number of documents retrieved.

Among them, Huang Helai of Central South

University is the author with the largest number of

papers published in the field of traffic accidents in

the past five years. There are 21 articles in total,

accounting for 0.26% of the total number of

retrieved documents. The number of citations and

total connection strength of the article are much

higher than other authors.

Figure 1: Density maps of major research countries.

Figure 2: Co-author network among prolific authors.

ICPDI 2022 - International Conference on Public Management, Digital Economy and Internet Technology

3.5

Key Words

According to the number of occurrences of each key

word not less than twenty times, the top twenty key

word information is filtered out, and the

visualization view of keyword coverage in the field

of traffic accidents is shown in the following table.

The visualized view of the coverage of keywords

in the field of traffic accidents is shown in the figure

below.

Figure 3: Key word coverage visualization view.

According to the search results listed in Figure 3,

the top twenty key words with the highest total

connection strength are accidents, risk, safety, traffic

accidents, injuries, mortality, crashes, drivers,

model, road safety, impact, trauma, injury,

epidemiology, behavior, severity, injury severity,

traffic safety, age, alcohol. Indicating that the main

research direction of traffic accidents is the severity

of the accident, the main research objects are

drivers’ driving behavior, age, blood alcohol

content, etc. The main indicators for judging the

severity of the accident are injury rate, fatality rate,

etc.

3.6

Cited Literature

According to the number of citations of each article

not less than ten times, the top fifty literature

information is screened out. The density map of the

citations in the field of traffic accidents is shown in

the following table.

The density map of citations in the field of traffic

accidents is shown in the figure below.

Figure 4: Citation density map.

Among the top fifty cited papers, they mainly focus

on the following seven research directions:

• Analysis of the severity of injuries to

drivers, occupants, and cyclists in traffic accidents.

• Statistical analysis of traffic accident data.

• Short-term prediction of traffic accidents.

• Prediction of the severity of traffic accident

damage.

• Analysis of intersection accidents.

• Analysis of the causes of accidents such as

fog and rain.

• Analysis of the impact of dynamic factors

and vehicle speed on the accident.

4 CONCLUSION

Based on the document co-occurrence network

analysis and visualization tool VOS viewer software,

this paper conducts a quantitative analysis of 8125

papers in the field of traffic accident research from

2016 to 2020. Through the source of the document,

the main research country, the main research

institution, the author of the paper, quantitative

analysis of key words and cited papers in the paper,

it is concluded that the most important document

source in the current traffic accident field is

Accident analysis and prevention, the most

important research countries are the United States

and China, and the most important research

institutions are Tsinghua University and Tongji

University. The main research hotspots are traffic

accident severity analysis, statistical analysis of

traffic accidents, short-term prediction of traffic

accidents, prediction of traffic accident severity, and

analysis of the impact of dynamic factors such as

weather on accidents. The research results of this

article provide domestic scholars with an intuitive

understanding of the topics that have not been fully

studied in my country and existing the gap between

research and foreign frontier fields has certain

reference significance.

International Research Progress on Trafﬁc Accident based on Bibliometric Analysis Method

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This work is supported by National Key R&D

Program of China (Grant No. 2019YFE0108000).

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