The landscape of safety management systems research

Abstract

Safety management systems (SMSs) are widely applied across many industrial sectors, and a large body of literature has been published addressing their design, implementation, effectiveness, and associated challenges. This article presents a high-level analysis of the SMS research domain, guided by a set of questions addressing the contents, structure, and evolution the research domain, its dominant themes and focus topics, the key scientific domains and journals contributing to its development, and the key publications serving as an intellectual basis for SMS related research. The results show a rapidly increasing volume of research outputs and a shift from research based in North America and Europe to Asia and Australia. There is only a limited number of institutions enduringly contributing to the field, and there are relatively few stable research collaborations, with the number of Chinese institutions publishing SMS related research fast expanding in recent years. The domain is strongly interdisciplinary and embedded in applied domains of science, with industrial engineering the most contributing category, as well as categories focusing on the industrial application domains. A temporal evolution of the research activity in different application domains is apparent, with an initial focus on occupational health and safety, followed by process safety, patient safety, food safety, and construction safety. SMS research has a strong relation to safety culture and safety climate research, and while safety and risk management concepts and theories form an important knowledge base for most application domains, the dominant views on accident causation differ between these. Research on SMS in the food industry is relatively separated from the other application domains. Based on the findings, various future research directions are discussed.