Mapping the intersection of road safety education and performance assessment: a bibliometric analysis

Résumé

Background: Road traffic injuries are the world's leading cause of preventable death and disproportionately affect young people. Research on road safety education and on performance assessment in road safety has developed largely in parallel, and the intersection between the two remains only loosely formalised, particularly from a management and social science perspective, where, to the authors' knowledge, no focused bibliometric mapping of this intersection has yet been proposed (Section 7). Research purpose: this study conducts a bibliometric analysis of the scientific literature on this intersection, identifying publication patterns, the most represented authors and journals, thematic clusters, and collaboration networks. Data source and methods: bibliometric data were retrieved from Scopus and Web of Science up to the end of November 2024 following the PRISMA protocol; 24 documents were retained from an initial pool of 85 records, processed using VOSviewer (version 1.6.20) and Zotero. Results: the analysis identifies five thematic clusters built around twenty-six terms, twenty-five of which explicitly structure these clusters. The most-cited documents concern hazard-perception training for young novice drivers and machine-learning applications to road performance; a keyword-driven construct-drift phenomenon affecting two of these documents is identified and discussed (Section 5.4). Accident Analysis and Prevention, Sustainability, and the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health jointly account for 37.5% of retained papers. Scientific contribution: this paper offers one of the first focused bibliometric mappings of this intersection from a management and social science perspective, intended to inform future research agendas. Managerial implications: the results are directly relevant to educators, road safety agencies, government bodies, and youth associations. Given the modest corpus size and reliance on a single bibliometric technique, these findings should be read as an exploratory map rather than a definitive synthesis.

JEL Classification: R41; I28

Paper type: Bibliometric Research