The history of road safety research: A quantitative approach

• Developments in road safety research are described from the 1900s until 2010.
• We explored whether paradigms as presented in the road safety literature can be confirmed on quantitative grounds.
• Electronic databases have been searched and papers with matching search criteria were selected for analysis.
• Varying trends over time could be identified which are generally in line with the different road safety paradigms.

In this paper we provide a global description in quantitative terms, of the developments in road safety research from the early 1900’s until 2010. To this end, electronic databases have been searched and papers matching search criteria were selected for analysis. Word and co-word frequencies of key-words in all the titles and abstracts of these publications were collected and analysed. In this study, we explored the possibility to identify historical trends in road safety research topics. Furthermore we explored whether the important paradigms concerning the history of road safety research as presented in the literature can be confirmed on quantitative grounds. It is concluded that the first results are promising: varying trends over time could be identified in the selected topics, which are generally in line with the different road safety paradigms. Finally, a number of limitations of the present study are listed, including the incompleteness of the currently used dataset.