Two decades on human reliability analysis: A bibliometric analysis and literature review

•This paper provides a systematic review of researches on HRA.•A set of 271 journal articles published between 1999 and 2020 was identified.•Bibliometric analysis was conducted to provide insights into the research theme.•Current situation, hotspots and future opportunities on HRA are identified. Human reliability analysis (HRA) is a systematic technique to assess human systematic risk, and has been widely used in various industries for enhancing the safety and reliability of complex socio-technical systems. However, there is a lack of a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of the literature on this topic. This article aims to provide academics and practitioners with a bibliometric overview and visualization of the HRA field. For doing so, 271 publications derived from the Web of Science and published from 2009 to 2020 were analyzed by the CiteSpace regarding cooperation network, co-citation network, and keyword co-occurrence network. The cooperation network analysis indicates that the most productive authors in the HRA area are Jinkyun Park, Wondea Jun and Yochan Kim from the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, and the selected publications mainly from South Korea, USA, and China. By the co-citation network analysis, the core journals are identified as Reliability Engineering & System Safety, Safety Science, and Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries; the influential authors are Alan D Swain, Erik Hollnagel, and Barry A Kirwan; and the emerging research trends are determined as “decision making”, “humane performance data”, “dependence assessment”, and “ratio magnitude estimation”. The keyword co-occurrence network analysis shows that the research hotspots in the HRA domain are “CREAM”, “quantification”, and “performance”. Based on these trends and blind spots in the literature, potential future research directions are also suggested. The results provide valuable information for scholars to grasp the current situations, hotspots, and future development trends of the HRA area.