Behavior based safety in projects: A bibliometric analysis of global literature

Behavior-Based Safety (BBS) is the art of communicating and correcting unsafe behaviors of project and factory staff. It was developed from behavioral sciences through direct observations of behavior changes. Scholars across the globe have examined the efficacy of BBS in ensuring safe behaviors in projects. However, the available literature is fragmented, and there is a need to have a panoramic, systematic, and comprehensive understanding of BBS. This study synthesizes, analyzes, and categorizes the BBS literature to provide a conceptual framework and inputs for further research. The study was conducted using bibliometric analysis of 56 research articles from the Scopus database. The results present a bird's-eye view of published materials on BBS. The bibliographic coupling helped categorize the outcomes of BBS into various clusters. The study also found that most highly cited articles were from the construction industry. Future researchers may examine the findings of seminal studies, identified as the most cited documents, to inform design choices and trade-offs that address the major hindrances to implementing BBS in its true spirit.